Ladislav Koza

“As I’ve said before, I ran away about three or four times from Germany. They wouldn’t let me cross the border with the Kennkarte so I just travelled to Bílina, to Chotějovice and there was a company that shipped coal to Czechoslovakia. These guys helped me. Up to Louny, where the frontier with the Sudetenland began, I could stay in the compartment. From there, they put me into the cargo car and covered me with coal. In this way I crossed the frontier. Well as I’ve said, it was crazy stuff.”

“In Kladno, an engineering-school student shot a German soldier, the soldier’s name was Kniest. The Germans reacted by closing down all secondary school – the school of engineering, the business academy and the pedagogical institute. So I didn’t have anything to do and therefore I worked in the shaft. I remember that. Then I worked in the metal works. Later I commuted to Prague because my parents didn’t want me to do such heavy work. I was looking for a new job and I got into that company Baal movies.”

“The Russians came in their tank. We told them that there was a gun fight. I’ll never forget that. Bullets were flying in the air, I swear, bullets were flying everywhere around. That Russian, he climbed out of the tank and went to the entrance gate. They kicked the gate open. We were guarding the place but we were so freaked out we would shoot everything that moved. They just went inside, ignoring the fire… They didn’t care for their lives or they must have been totally drunk.”

“I was a lathe operator. They re-trained me as a lath operator and I was making torpedoes. The lathe was bigger than this whole room.” Interviewer: “How did the semi-finished product look like? Was it a cylinder?” “Yes, it was a regular cylinder, a pipe about three meters in diameter. We only processed the centre, the head and bottom was processed by someone else.” Interviewer: “So the pipe came and what did you do? What did you lathe?” “We just lathed the top and the centre. We lathed the outer coating and the inside of the pipe. We were just turning the pipe. Then we did the screw threads on both sides because the head and the bottom had to be screwed to the body. It was a good job because I just had to mount it and watch it and that was my shift.”