"My first experience was in the Socialist Donbas coal mine, at a depth of 1,100 metres. It was horrible. Every day someone was killed there. You're in total darkness, you only have a lamp, but it doesn't last six hours, you only have to turn it on when you need to look at something. Mostly you work in the dark by feel. There's a constant noise, a kind of banging, machines running - everything is humming. Then suddenly there's a bang and a shout: 'Eagle!' The head of the tunnel is always a little tilted, the carriage is lowered there by itself on a rope. The rope is then lifted and wound onto the winch and the rock is exported. The trolley is heavy, the rope wears out and sometimes breaks. The cart then picks up speed and the tons come crashing down. And when the cart passes a certain critical speed, it derails and flies. It's called 'flying eagle'. They shout, 'Eagle, eagle, eagle!' They all have to climb as high as they can on the pegs, staying under the ceiling and hoping that where they are, the trolley doesn't jump out and hit them in the back. A lot of times they'd pull somebody out - bloody, black, dirty - because they'd get pinned, badly injured."
"We couldn't believe it. The world was upside down. Some nights we couldn't sleep, we just couldn't believe it. It's the same as if Natasha and I had a fight forever, you know? I don't even want to say the word - like we broke up. And then suddenly there's death everywhere. So many people! It's horrible. Terrible. And then you hear the newscasters and propagandists saying, 'This will pass, everything will be all right. We'll go to Kiev, we'll walk around and our husbands will look at black Ukrainian girls and we'll all hug each other.' Such pain. Never. Never again."
"So they slept in monasteries. They went by car, and there was a volunteer priest who guided them from one monastery to another, and they were fed there. So they drove to Prague like that for seven days. They took her to Poland and from there she took a bus to Prague. She gave the driver my phone, he called me: 'Your mother is already here, will you come and get her?' I came to Florenc. The bus was already there. I said: 'Are you coming from Ukraine?' - 'Yes.' I go there, I look, but I don't see her anywhere. And then I notice that there's a woman with her back to me. I recognise her coat, collar and hat. And as she walked past me, I looked at her face - it was like crumpled brown wrapping paper. I didn't recognize her. I look at her and say, 'Mom, is that you?' - 'Oh, Sashenka!' She burst into tears, hugged me and we drove home. The grandchildren were waiting there, they had flowers for her."
Alexander Kozlov was born on 28 January 1961 in the village of Pokrovskoye in the Dnepropetrovsk region of the then Soviet Union. He studied at the Donetsk Technical School of Industrial Automation and worked at the Socialist Donbas coal mine. In 1985 he graduated with honours from the Donetsk Art School. In 1990, he graduated from the V. I. Muchinova Leningrad Higher School of Arts and Crafts. In 1989 he was arrested, interrogated and beaten by the KGB for protesting on Nevsky Prospekt against the government’s lies about the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident. For a year he hid from the KGB in Horlivka in the Donetsk region. In 1990 he fled abroad and was granted political asylum in Czechoslovakia. After the collapse of the USSR, he was given a UN passport. He worked as a sculptor - restorer of Baroque objects in Germany, France, Switzerland, he restored statues and churches in many regions of the Czech Republic. He made a copy of the statue of the Virgin Mary by Matthias Braun and the Virgin Mary by Jan Michal Brokoff. At the beginning of the all-out Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, his wife’s parents were killed in Mariupol and his mother fled from rocket attacks from Olšany in the Sumy region to Prague. He has helped many Ukrainian refugees with children in the Czech Republic, organizing hostels in Cesky Brod and Kourim.
