“It happened in Eliáš. A certain chauffer, one of those, who was delivering the uranium, driving a tatra car every five minutes and capsized it into a hopper and we had to push it on to the belts, so he drove over a dog and carried it there. I was working on the surface around half a year. We had a little cabin there and when it was cold we could fire a wood in a stove. As the ore they brought was wet and in winter got frozen and we had to beat it to small pieces. That was a nasty horrible job. So he brought us a dog. We had little stove there, got a pan and one of us said: ‚I will cook it at a night shift.‘ So he did, I don’t know how or where he flayed it. In the morning we smelled baked meat. It went all the way to watch-tower, the guards were changing every two hours and smelling the lovely smell. When two hours passed, they came in asking what we cooked. When they found out it was a dog, that was a trouble as their dog got lost and we ate a police dog.”
“I was actually arrested on 26 February, 1948 as a junior national socialist. In Pilsen square there was a large Bolshevik manifestation and Rudolf Slánský had a speech mentioning the representatives of the national socialist party and the folks party are traitors and will be punished. We were about fifteen or eighteen boys there, all national socialists. When people shouted ‚Hang! Hang!‘, we shouted: ‚Long live Petr Zenkl!‘ Back then he was the head of the socialists. We shouted about five or six times and then they went to get us. There were thousands of people, we were running, but not all of us. I managed to run to the party´s office in Riegrova street. But they learnt from those, they caught, who was there. So on the second day they came for me to my job in Škoda company, where I worked, just before I got my training certificate, I was eighteen years old then.”
“The worst part was from Tachov to the border. The crossing was nothing at all, but moving around there in a large area of eight to ten kilometres was suspicious. It was a bordering line, to which you needed a special permit usually given to those, who lived there, worked or had a cottage. We were driven there by a milk car, which collected milk from the farmer at the border. They always milked the cows, put the basket on the ramp and the milkman took it in mornings or evenings to deliver to a milk factory in Tachovsko. He also took us to the permit area, almost to the border, about four or five kilometres and we walked the rest on foot.”
Ladislav Nocar was born on 25 July, 1929 in Nýřany. His father Josef worked as a locksmith in the Škoda company in Pilsen, and his mother Božena took care of the household. After occupation of the Sudetenland in 1938 the family moved to the near Tlučné, which was already in the territory of the protectorate. There he joined the scout and got a nickname Rix, experienced the first trips and camping. Ladislav didn’t enjoy school opposed to his older brother Stanislava and in 1944 he started learning to become an engineer locksmith. Right after war Ladislav was at the renewal of Junák. He entered the National Social Youth. During a communist demonstration on 25 February, 1948 at the Pilsen square the youth opposed to a hatred speech of Rudolf Slánský. The crowd was after the boys. Ladislav ran away, but on the second day the secret police came to take him. He spent twenty eight days in custody. After that he was fired from Škoda company. In summer he left together with the leader of scouts, Karel Bek, to Germany and got to a refugee camp in Murnau. Ladislav crossed the border three times and got two more people abroad. During the last visit of Czechoslovakia he was arrested together with Karel Bek and others with their intelligence task in Kladruby near Stříbro. A two year jail punishment was later prolonged to twelve. All in all he spent almost six years in the communist uranium labour camps Eliáš, Bytíz and others. After returning to civil life he started as machine repairman in Masný průmysl Pilsen, where he worked until retirement. In 1968 and 1989 he participated in renewal of Junák in Tlučná. Ladislav Nocar died on 17 July, 2016.
