"Everything was underground there. It was all corridors, the factory was all corridors. There was steam, there was air and electric cables. Those were wide, lighted corridors. And so there were lights there, on one side there was air, steam and stuff like that. And on the other there would be cables. That was all underground. That was the shelter. That was our sleeping place for the night, mostly. When things worked, the pumps, then we hid inside. And our foreman looked for us. He had this hand pump and we always got hit by this squirt of water, as he was spraying us, so we rushed out of there. There were loads of nooks and crannies there. We thought it was great fun. And he used to curse: 'Hund, Hund, tschechische Hund...' He was angry at us for sleeping. That was for sure, we were supposed to be doing something. The Germans often rode to work on bikes. And we went the opposite direction, a group of us from the camp, and we didn't get out of their way. We said: 'Look, he's on a bike. Let's not get out of his way. What will he do?' We were young, we took it as fun. And one time he took a pistol to us. He didn't do anything, but we got out of the pretty fast, and let him ride by. We were a bit dumb at times. There were warnings aswell. There were labour camps with convicts, along our road to work. And many times there was someone hanging from the gallows. As a warning. We passed by, saw two or three on the gallows. I don't know what punishments they had. It was war. I tell you, Linz was beaten to pieces. Just piles of rubble in the end. When there was the first air raid, then some people propped their walls or other stuff, windows were boarded up. Some of those houses were wreckages afterwards. The bombed all the time, the factory they did. Even the town was blown to pieces. And again they cleared it up fast, so that the electricity would work again. They always managed to patch it up. Terrible, that war, terrible. What could we do. We got through it."
"Some people had guns, so they fired into the air. Most people had guns there. I remember: my sister, when she was getting married, then there were a good many shots in the village. She got married after the war. So many shots, like during field day. Everyone brought out the gun or rifle they had. Everything they took from theVlasovites. When the Vlasovites stripped in the forest, then almost everyone had some gun or pistol at home. Afterwards, when Vlasov's army stripped in that forest, then everyone from the village rushed there with cows or mares. And they loaded up with everything possible. Clothes and lots of other stuff they took. Boots... and they had all sorts of equipment. And they left all of that in the forest. Even their livelihood they left there, flour, sacks of it, and they just ran off. Mares were running to and fro and some of the villagers caught them and afterwards bought them off as confiscated property and used them on their fields and such."
"That's where Foreman Buschman was. He, when he signed our leave, he wanted us to bring him cigarettes in return. And almost always when I was returning home, he came up to me, saying: 'Zigarette, Zigarette.' I said: 'Ja, Zigarette.' I took out my cigarbox, they used to be this chrome colour. I had hand-rolled cigarettes, and I offered him to take one. He took offence at that, he thought that I would bring him a whole pack. I offered him one cigarette. And the next time he didn't sign me any leave. Maybe he promised to do it, but when I was supposed to go, then he didn't give me the leave. I couldn't go anywhere."
"The raids were a pretty sight. There were so many, many dead bodies. The first air raid was on a factory, some two and a half thousand dead in those ironworks. Heaps, heaps, heaps of dead bodies. Because in those days no one ran, because they never broke through. Me when I had night shifts, then we often lay on the sun next to the labour camp, and we saw those groups, the Americans, fly above us. So we used to say: 'Boys, don't chuck them yet.' When we saw them in front of us. When they were above us: 'Okay, you can chuck them now.' So the bombs started dropping. We thought it was great fun. And we never ran for the camp, even when it was a night alarm. I wasn't afraid they would kill me. I mean, they never bombed our place."
"Stories... just that they had good cider there. We all liked that. So we always bought who-knows-how-many buckets of cider. We took them home from the pubs. That's where they sold cider. They didn't sell beer much. So we all bought some cider and we boiled it on our stove, so it was nice and warm. Well, what else should we have done... We were young single boys. There was no fun there. It's certain that there were four brothels in Linz. I remember that even today: Maxim, Ostende, New Villa and Paris. Four for the Germans and four for the foreigners. That's how it was divided."
Heaps of dead bodies.”
Karel Šimůnek was born on the 24th of December 1922 in Újezd, near Kasejovice. We learned the locksmith craft and was drafted into the forced labour corps in Linz. Upon returning to Czechoslovakia, he encountered Vlasov’s army. After the war he worked for ČZ (Česká zbrojovka) in Strakonice and also for a short while worked on the Lipno dam.
