Václav Pek

“In 1968 I was in Bohemia and then I was a soldier. Things were still kind of tense, people were still talking about the revolution. When I came to the army, they recorded us, our nationality. I said I’m Czech, our nationality was Czech. When they heard I was Czech, the commanders called me Dubček.”

“I experienced it myself later. Before I retired, one bloke let some mine carts slip, if there hadn’t been those metal rods, they would’ve fallen on me. I was down the bottom and they let the carts slip, it was downhill in that mineshaft. So their mine carts came loose, there were about ten and there was a terrible bang, but I was saved because they didn’t fall all the way down on me, just rocks. We had helmets. I crouched by the rope and waited for it to fall on me. But I was safe, nothing happened. The whole time I was down in the mines, the place I was, about twenty victims, twenty lives were lost there. They called them ‘accidents’. Some were dead, some wounded. In twenty years, about twenty dead. It was dangerous. We’d left home and didn’t know if we’d come back from the mines. Three people from Svatá Helena died.”