Jan Šefl

“I was also given the work of supplying bread with a German driver. We’d take some fifteen to sixteen hundred loaves from the German bakery. [...] The Russians were clearing the snow there. And we’d pass by with the bread, and because we had to stop, they smelt the bread from the car. They said: ‘Davay! Davay!’ I opened the back door, [...] I couldn’t help it - I threw them a loaf of bread. [...] They started fighting for it, with shovels. So I threw them another one. And there was trouble. There were some youngsters there, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old, who had guns; they were guarding the Russian captives, and they fired a shot. They didn’t fire at them though, not at them. We arrived, and they already had a report that this had happened. So they called us into the office of Front Führer Köln. He asked: ‘Who threw out that bread?’ We were silent. [...] So he said: ‘Very well, give them a military tribunal!’ So I stepped forward and said: ‘I did it.’ [...] He took me by the collar and began bashing me against the door. How come I gave them to our enemies? How come I had supported them?”

“And then they assigned me to work at a German submarine base. At first I worked outside. I never saw such a job before. Our group of about eight people was trained to work in a caisson. That was an iron dome with a diameter of 10 by 12 metres. We’d climb into it via the top using a ladder, and they sent compressed air there. We had to do like this [pull our auricles - ed.] so they could put the air in there. Twenty-three metres. That meant that the water had to be pushed out by pressure. Because those were caissons, that’s what it’s called. A caisson. And it sank because of its weight. But there was water under it. And we had to take the water out that was underneath it, seashells and all, and we sent it out via the chimney [muck tube - trans.]. That was a kind of chimney. We sent it up through the chimney. But also, one time what I experienced, when they pulled it up through the chimney, and then the chimney was dropped, it fell down, and the pressure, seeing that the boy was right beside it, it tore his lungs apart. Ripped his lungs up. The pressure became... and he was down there. We were give leave for that. As Czechs, we got time off because of it.”