Horst Schmidt

"He took me to the camp, and there he gave me a hard time. He told me: "What do I think giving cigarettes to a prisoner? But I told him, 'Look, he did a good job, he cracked the block on our car and he weld it together for us. The manager, the Russian, and Brýda, and he said I didn’t need any official request for it, that he would do it, and then we should just give him some cigarettes because he smokes. And then he said, ‘Today, it’s cigarettes, and tomorrow, you’ll bring me a gun.’ That’s what he said to me."

"We were able to watch it. We were across the road almost at the main gate where the camp started. When you stood in front of the main gate, there was a camp to the right that was separately fenced off with electric fencing and there were those towers there as well. But the towers were also at the normal shaft, because the prisoners would go from the camp to the shaft where they were working so that they couldn't escape. Well, they escaped there once, too. "They drilled an underground tunnel under the road to escape, but before they could get out, they got caught. They say it was a real commotion there. The guys told me about it because I wasn’t at work then. But also at the mine—not in the camp, but at the mine—where there were barbed wires, two kinds of them, and the watchtowers, that’s where someone got shot, and I was at work then.” – “They shot him while escaping? Or trying to get out?” – “Well, they apparently even sent him. They say they threw some pieces of paper into the wires, into the shooting zone. And apparently, they sent him there to collect those papers.”

"Sometimes we went down the shaft, like down a ladder. And there's always a ladder eight metres long in the shaft, and then there's a floor, because if somebody falls down, they don't fall all the way down. So we're always in these flooring, as the ladder goes down, there's only eighty by eighty openings, and when you were climbing through, you had to take the apparatus off every time, because you were going up two or three levels of ladders. So always taking the mask off and putting it back on and putting it back on again, because we were paid to breathe it. That's harmful, that breathing. There were these filters, they've got these bottles nowadays, but in those days it was a big box that was on your back and it had a filter and a little bomb in it. The filter was said to be harmful. They said there was charcoal in there. And they always took the filter out of the breathing if we didn't smell it, because then it's heavy because it gets sucked up. "And they could tell exactly whether we were breathing or not, to make sure we weren’t slacking off, like taking off the mask and just sitting in the chamber without breathing. They always weighed it, and based on that, we got paid for the breathing."

"Here's the one that just took our furniture when Mom had a brand new sewing machine. We thought she took the head out of the sewing machine, that was the dipped one, the machine was about a year old. So she took out the machine and just left the base, and he took the furniture from us and he thought the machine was there, but the head wasn't there. So he was terrorizing us and asking where we got it. He came to our apartment and didn't find it anywhere. Then he thought we had a coal cellar downstairs and a potato cellar next door. They always bought potatoes for the whole winter in the fall, and mom put the head in the potatoes. And he took us down to put the potatoes on the side, and he was looking for the head in it. Mom didn't want to, and he pulled out a guard's gun and shot the potatoes next to us. And he was terrorizing us. He was such a rascal..."

"The Russians even told us, my mother and my uncle, when we were moving, that if we could, we should take the furniture we were taking to my grandmother's place, where we should store it, so we'd better take it to the former GDR, to Bärenstein, which is opposite Vejprty. It's almost like they're connected. Because the Czechs will steal it from us, it's new. That's what the Russians told us and they'll take it away. And we said that we didn't need it, that they wouldn't take anything from us. And it turned out exactly as they told us. The Russians didn't, but the Czechs stole it from us."