Josef Šmoldas

“That was in 1959, when the sappers arrived with lots of machines. I’d never seen so many Tatra 111s [famous Czech lorries - trans.] and bulldozers in one place before. I wondered: What are they going to do here? What’s happening? Then Kvapil came up, he spoke with my father and said: ‘Jaroš, they’re going to knock down the houses marked with numbers. Come with me, take a bucket of water, we’ll wash some of the numbers off. Those are decent houses and I wouldn’t want Zlaté Hory to lose them.’ That man saved several houses that would otherwise have been demolished. They’d have gone down. That was when I realised that something big was happening in Zlaté Hory. Some ten buildings bit the dust on the square alone, and new ones were built instead.”

“At the time records were being set all over the country. And not just in the country but in the whole Socialist bloc. It came from Russia. The regime declared the duty to get in line, and so all plants had to break records. The way it worked was that some instructions came from up above, say from the government to the enterprise, and the enterprise reached out to the plants. The way it was [in our mine] was that the mine manager called a meeting, the men gathered up, and he said: ‘Look, chaps, there’s a way to earn some extra if we set a record. It’ll help the plant up top, and it’s an opportunity for you to earn some money.’ If he had asked just me, I wouldn’t have bothered. We earned a lot already, and there was no point in chasing along for a whole month just to get a thousand [crowns] more. But the men jumped at the offer.”

“The downhole drilling survey hit a deposit. A bit further on they found more of the same material, except the deposit just happened to head off in the direction of the first point, whereas they thought that was the size of the lode. So they went through the middle, but the edges were poorer because each lode has a different level of content. Some of them had lots of percent of copper, others only had zero point zero one four. That was at the very limits of possible extraction. But we didn’t have anywhere to import it from, and copper was a strategic resource. The industry needed it. So there was no other choice but to mine what we had.”