Christian Mayer

“It was led by one of our friends, a guy who was a kayak paddler from one Smíchov club. My dad was making models of ships, many of them. At that time he was working on a ship for which he needed about forty small cannons, and I thus used the brass to make about forty small cannons, and this guy, this friend of mine, told me: ‘Man, we will probably get shot for this, because you have used so much brass.’ I told him: ‘This is war production what I am doing here!’ He was rushing all over the factory floor to get hold of some more brass to make it correctly. I still have some of those small cannons at home. I finished them. I used them to create various model cannons for ships.”

“I went to work on the construction of the Intelligence Bridge, where I told them that I was a carpenter and they thus hired me as a carpenter, but then did a different job… After about a month, I started doing underwater work in caissons. We were building the four caissons that are in the foundations of the Intelligence Bridge. The deepest one under Barrandov is interesting, it is built in the depth of thirty metres. The pressure down there is three atmospheres, and the work shifts were arranged accordingly. Our salary was a bit higher than the top manager’s salary, and we were being paid very well, but there were other guys who could not stand this kind of work for too long and they left. The work then finished and I continued doing underwater work in caissons in the Lipno water reservoir for some time.”