Petr Vaníček

“We didn’t like the morning shift because you ran the risk of having a lunch alarm or matching exercises. The drunken commandant would order us to set out on a march and you had to leave everything as it was and go. Sometimes, they would just check if we had packed right or something of the sort. But more often than not, they would send us out on a marching exercise. The drunken commandant was put in a small van accompanying the marching unit. He usually fell asleep and we had to march on till he woke up or came back to his senses at least a little bit. Then he would order us to return to the base. So we never really knew for how long we would march or when we would come back. It was not exceptional for us to come back and have lunch and dinner at the same time, usually both cold.”

“The whole Czechoslovak industry had to work for the Wehrmacht, it didn’t matter what they produced. The factories had to adapt their production to the needs of the German army and they were put under occasional German oversight. The overseeing was by the Germans, not by our people. It was done by inspectors from the Wehrmacht or even the SS itself. They didn’t really change how the factories were operated, the production plans just had to accommodate German war needs. So they had to deliver certain quantities of goods and those quantities were, of course, under tight scrutiny. The most tightly guarded aspect was the allocation of input material and then the resulting production output. If somebody refused to cooperate, he was dealt with in short order. The boss was sent to a concentration camp, there was no discussion about it. The board was sent on forced labor to Germany and the firm got a new management that was more in tune with the German wishes. The company then carried on with the business under the direction of the new boss, who was a German.”

“In 1942, the Nazis introduced the so-called total occupational duty for everybody. This basically meant that everybody was obliged to work, and most work was directed to the assembly lines producing for the German army, the Wehrmacht. Those factories – like the one my father owned – helped to employ a lot of people who otherwise wouldn’t find any other job. If you didn’t find a job in the Protectorate, they would assign you to forced labor in the Third Reich, which put you in a much worse situation than here at home, not only because of the allied air raids and bombings that had already begun to target German production centers at that time. These factories were recruiting people en masse and actually keeping them from the Nazis. Not to mention that some of these people were considered parasites by the laws of that time and were sent either to forced labor to Germany, or – what was even worse – straight to concentration camps. Paradoxically, it was these people that most often turned into informers who denounced the factory owners, pressed charges against them, and sent them to so-called peoples’ courts. They were put on trial according to the small or the large decree. The wrath of these people, who should have actually been thankful to the factory owners for saving them from forced labor in the Reich, was symptomatic for the time just after the war in 1945. These people later became the national caretakers, the scum that devastated our nation, country and economy. These people took over our factory as well.”