Ing. Václav Pošta

"It was really exploitation. The benefits were just a cover. The benefits were financial, housing or holiday. Or, for example, the opportunity to buy a television, a freezer, a fridge or a coat on Miners' Day. But nobody realized the environment that these people... the environment that we worked in and the circumstances. There was minimal information known about safety, about accidents. So I think that even at that time, those people deserved the benefits and the perks. And I think everybody should try the job and then start saying something about it."

"Once again my mum decided. I even had a draft order for the military service, rocket army. They needed land surveyors there. It was a very disturbed year. And when I got the draft order, I thought I'd give university a try. Until then, I had refused. I had my first love in Slaný, I simply refused to leave the town. My mother said we should try the university. I was really lucky in my life, because at that time they were doing more entry exams and in that turbulent year they were admitting everybody to university. I took the exams on a later date and on 6 October 1968, I started at university. I remember lively that I got off in Ostrava-Poruba, which is now the Ostrava-Svinov railway station. It was around six o'clock in the morning. The dust from the local Šverma shaft fell on me. I know that I spent my first weeks in Ostrava at an ophthalmologist. I wasn't used to such a fall of dust. So in 1968 I started studying at the Faculty of Mining and Geology."

"They [the investigators] told us at the beginning that they were looking for barrels and in those barrels there would be victims they needed to find. I didn't feel like doing it. They said that the people who had done it were still free, so I was setting conditions on who was going to guard us all the time. I knew it was work for a month, two or three months. It's not like you come in, you dive and you're done. I was able to get a robot to do it, a submarine that could be lowered on a cable to a depth of a hundred and fifty meters. I wanted to make it easier for divers to dive. A diver can only do one, maximum two dives a day to that depth because the decompression times are quite long. And the place, that it would be done under the Žďákovský Bridge, was still being looked for. Also, the team had to get coordinated. Because the way it was done was that compressed air was pumped into the divers' diving suits. They went on excess pressure, not individual bombs, because that would be problematic due to decompression. We worked a lot with the dive robot to save people some diving and not getting them to the bottom in terms of health. Gradually the thing evolved. We were really under police surveillance, we were being guarded. The police were all over the valley. We were under the Žďákovský Bridge on a big pontoon where all the equipment was. They started mapping the bottom. First we got maps of what the bottom looked like before the flooding [of the valley]. So we were able to orient ourselves on the basis of some of the structures that had been flooded. That's how we oriented ourselves. We started using chemical light. What had already been explored was then lit up in the water. Gradually, we found everything, including the people in the nets. I was told it was a great achievement by the police."