Miroslav Pilík

“He left me there; at that time we were working there and demolishing the abandoned houses which were close to the border zone. One reason for the demolitions was so that ‘intruders’ as they were called at that time would not abuse them. Some of them were passing through there, although it was difficult for them to cross the border, anyway. We as soldiers were thus demolishing some of the houses and securing them, and we got some discarded trucks from the army, they were the Tatra 128, which was a real junk, and some bulldozers and diggers. We did this work in the area which stretched from Děčín here, from Petrovice, and all the way to the Saint Sebastian Mountain, which is somewhere by Chomutov, and the zone reached all the way there.”

“The ore was to be mined from there. Sometimes there was not too much of it, but the way it was done was that the raw ore which accumulates there when the rock is blasted as the shaft advances upward was leveled and wooden planks were placed over it and then covered with tarpaulin and then they drilled down to the streak and placed some weak explosive charge there and blasted it. Then there were so called collectors, they were people who were searching for active ore which was to be collected, this active ore is much darker, it is stone-blue, and this was being placed in special boxes and the waste rock was being left down there in the shaft.”