Petr Vaníček

“My father and his whole generation, they were unbelievable in the way they worked their hands to the bone. They were just incredibly laborious and selfless when it came to promoting the interests of this country, particularly the former legionaries who would give their life for the First Czechoslovak Republic. Usually, these people were personalities with a first-grade character. My father was an abnormally honest man. He was also very kind. This is a feature most of them had in common. In those times, an employee was almost more worth than a member of the family. I’m not kidding you, it’s true! When I was a small kid, a boy of the age of 5, maybe even younger, I got beaten by my father for the first time. I was sitting in the car waiting for my dad to come from the office where he was finishing some work. An employee of his factory who was sweeping the yard was playfully making grimaces to cheer me up – the sort of thing you when little kids are around. I stuck out my tongue at him at the very moment my dad came back. I got beaten for that. I was told by my dad: ‘How dare you do something like that to a man who makes his living by honest work! All people like this deserve the utmost respect, son’. That was the kind of attitude these businesspeople of the old sort had toward their employees. It was utterly unthinkable for them not to pay their employees their wages. It was absurd for them to even imagine it. Today, it is common that employees end up with no pay and the director goes for a trip to Africa. Back in the old days, if somebody did that he would be disgraced in society forever. Nobody would ever talk to him again. This was the mood I grew up in, where words about the respect for the worker were not just mere phrases but had substance to them. They were kept unreservedly. That is the abysmal difference between the capitalism of the old days and the communism that came later.”

“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.”