"It was horrible, I was there about three times. They would put us in the cellar to cool down. There were only floor tiles there and I wore nothing but underwear. The window was unhinged. It was autumn. In the morning, I wanted to get up. As I was squatting all night and wanted to stand up, I was so stiff, I fell down. It was bad there. As I walked from the cell to the interrogation, a warden stood by the door. He used a towel to cover my eyes. Most of the time, the towel was wet. During interrogation, they placed me on a chair in the corner. They tied my hands and legs to the chair so that whenever I turned away, the chair would fall down. They'd place it standing again into the corner. And they beat me with the wet towel. It leaves no marks but it is as if one were kicked by a horse."
"I have a memory of them sending us to work in the mine on Christmas Day. The civilians who were present there hadn't worked on holidays. We were supposed to. The guys got angry. The wardens stayed upstairs and down there, there was the manager who chased us to work. When I arrived, he was already there. There was a water tank which was used to push water out. They threw him in there, wanting to drown him. As he held to the rim, they stomped on his finger so that he'd let go. Eventually, they pulled him out. He went up the pit and we haven't seen him since."
"It was terrible there. Initially, the norm was eighteen loaded cars, then they increased it to twenty-one. When we failed to meet it, we'd go from work directly to the bunker. The bunker was placed under the compressor cooling tank. When it was freezing cold, the walls were covered in white frost. The next day they sent us to work. If we failed to fulfill the norm again, we'd go back to the bunker. It ended up being every second day."
Miroslav Šír was born on 17 August 1928 in Hodky, a district of Světlá pod Ještědem. During WW II he took part in the anti-fascist resistance alongside his father Josef Šír. He helped Soviet paratroopers and partisans, transported weapons. Due to his disagreement with the 1948 communist takeover in Czechoslovakia, he and his friends made plans to emigrate. They were turned in to the authorities by a common acquaintance. He was arrested by the secret police in 1949, underwent numerous interrogations and beatings and was eventually sentenced to ten years in prison. He served in stone quarries and at uranium mines, doing time in the Bytíz, Vojna, Mořina, Jáchymov camps among others. As a result of a 1953 escape attempt, he was sentenced to further six years of heavy labour. In 1960, he was released on amnesty. Up until retirement, he worked in the Ton furniture company as a manager of machinery maintenance. Miroslav Šír died on May 31st, 2023.
