Stanislav Spáčil

"Like with the tickets. It was hard to get the chocolate anywhere, but at the big shop at Baťa's they announced once every week or during the week: 'We'll have chocolate.' There were big queues for that, but because we had the tickets we could always get something or other for the children."

"Now we found out that Podvala was taken by the Gestapo. And so during the next few months, two months I think, then every month we did a collection, everyone gave what they could afford to, if say we count that a week's wages was fifty, maybe a hundred crowns or so., what they could afford to give. My friend, Josef Šanca, collected the funds, after him it was Franta Bílek who visited Podvala's wife - she had a small boy and they saw to it that she had enough support. Whatever, both looked after her... say, if there was a slaughter then they took away a chunk of lard or something else, and they gave that to the wife. And now every month or so they sought to visit, because they found out he was in Bratislava, to keep him safe as long as possible. And then, say half a year or three quarters of a year it took, we found out that he was supposed to be executed. I don't if he was to be shot or what. But in the meantime they took him away and also one who protested, a building engineer called Hlobil, they took him as well and both of them were lost to us."

"One of the sabotages we did was while repairing a transformer for the munition works in Polečka. And now, when it was ready, the transformer had side plate bracing, and instead of iron it was braced with oil-boiled wood and put in the drying oven. And in the meantime, I mean when finishing the transformer, it was being dried and it was supposed to be dipped in warm oil. And now, so as to have it ready in the morning then we put it in the oven straight away that day before noon, and meanwhile there were already, or they claimed there were just two thousand, but there were ten thousand coils intended for submarines inside the oven already. So in the morning we opened the drying oven and the transformer was burnt halfway through, because the coils below it weren't covered, and the oil from the wooden side plates spilled out and set it on fire. In other words, no one thought of such a thing, because the oven had to be fixed pronto, an iron construction needed to be emplaced. Everything had to be isolated, but the whole oven had to be rebuilt. And at the same time we were afraid the Germans would talk through the whole thing, because beforehand when I arrived there, we had foreman Přikryl, Vyškov born. And after him, about what, a year or two, a long time, foreman Večerka, he was head for about half a year... and then there was this foreman, Píš his name was, from Ostrava or thereabouts, but he was, he supported the Germans, they said he was of German nationality, from around the borders."

"In the morning when I woke up nothing much was happening, but suddenly they told me... the nurses changed shift at six, and around eight-ish there were Gestapos asking after me. But the nurse said: 'Yeah, he was here, but he died before sunrise. The chart's still there, go and have a look.' And with that I was out of their sights and I didn't go back to work in a few days, but I did go after a week or so, I had a place held for me in Zlín. I didn't even visit my friend or the old workplace, really, as they had stopped the search for me."

"One of the biggest ones, that was towards the end, around '44, we didn't know everything, but we did know this: four 640 kilovolt transformers, in other words... just one transformer like that was good for several buildings at Baťa's, and three of them were being loaded on wagons. And during the loading, the person securing them in place, that was Franta Bílek, a carpenter who before the war had built things like the První brněnská (First Brno Machine Works) area. In other words a proper expert who, when moving the big transformers, they had complete check ups done every five years on the big stuff, and the check ups were done in our building. They brought in the transformer, that was, how could I say, well... very heavy, say five tonnes heavy, some of them. And they needed taking apart, checking and so on. But the ones I'm talking about, the three transformers destined for that Vienna town and the wagons, then when he was nailing them secure with, how many, say ten by ten centimetres the wooden ones, so when he was securing them, between each peg, each fifteen centimetre nail, and he put some twenty of the big ones there and cut right into the transformer, so that by the time it got to the Viennese New Town, all the oil had leaked out. And then our... they sent one of our master engineers with another worker to find out what the problem was etcetera. And when he got back, he said: 'Damn you, boys, we had to do it so as to stop them finding out what had happened. The important thing was that it had leaked or that it was because of the jolting during the trip and so on. So next time you're going, I'm not going again.' "