Jiří Typlt

"I was working on the third floor, where the height of the coal seam was eighty or ninety centimetres. That was also rather unusual for a man who had worked freely, in the open air. And that's where I had my accident, too. Because there is, if you know something about it, under the coal there's a kind of a stripe, mixed rocks and coal. And so I was trying to loosen it with the jackhammer, as the foreman had ordered me to do, and the whole seam came down on me, and my left leg got it."

"It was at the end of March, when a bomber crashed near Hřídelka near Lázně Bělohrad and the pilots made it through the forests to us near Kumburk. That's the castle there. And one day, that was, we were already on the field, in April, suddenly three people turned up in the house, who spoke to me in English at first. That was out of the question. But one of them spoke perfect German. He was disguised as a forester, with all the frippery. The other two, one was a house painter, and the other one, I've forgotten. I don't know. They found an empty house there by chance, and they stayed there for two and a half months or three months. We... my mother would give them milk. Bread, but it wasn't for them. Bread, they refused it. They wanted buns, or something like that, or rolls."