Czechoslovak Political Prisoners - über das Projekt Political ...

weighed from forty to ninety kilograms (88 – 198 pounds) and they were 45cm and each had
a lid. At the beginning they were sealing them, but they later didn’t have time for that so after
a while they just had latches so the box wouldn’t open. These boxes were measured for how
much radioactivity they had and they were loaded into larger containers. One container was
from one shaft. We were taking these small boxes from one shaft for four days until we filled
one container. In that box there were from 45-60 tons of material.
When the box was already full and it met the required tonnage, the material was put on
a long conveyor belt. This belt was about fifty meters long and about eighty centimeters wide.
The container was narrow and we had to load everything manually. We didn’t get any gloves
so all of our joints on our hands were scraped. On this belt the material ran into the first grinder
where above the grinder there was a net, the smaller material went through and the bigger
pieces went through and could fall into the grinder then. Here it was crushed into smaller
pieces and it ran on the second conveyor belt, which was forty or fifty meters long again. It
ran into a tower where everything was sorted and separated through another net, but this
net was finer so it let even smaller pieces through and the larger pieces that were about five
centimeters went through the grinder and were crushed into pieces of about five millimeters.
From here everything was taken out, put into a bunker, and from the bunker to the trailer and
this was taken to the last floor of the tower. This tower 9 was about twenty-seven meters high
and it’s standing there nowadays. Here the material was taken out on separating machines and
using gravity the material was sorted for the last time. When there was a bigger piece left it
would go back to the grinder again. So this way, everything was running until the granulated
material was no bigger then five millimeters. This final product was then taken to the bottom
floor into the bunker again and from there the barrels were filled. The barrels were about fifty
centimeters high and wide. It’s opening was fifteen centimeters wide and into this we had to
push sixty kilograms of granulated material from each shaft. It’s important to say that some
materials from some shafts, for example from Slavkov were lighter. So to push in sixty kilos
was quite a challenge. Material from Příbram was heavy and loading that was an easier job.
There were six people standing and one of them was loading the barrel while the other six
used tamping irons to pack it in tighter. Then the barrel was weighed and it went into a place
where it was sealed. On each seal of the barrel you could find a stamp with the information
from which shaft it came from, what was it’s total weight, and some other specific markings.
Then everything was put in storage. This storage was very long 150 – 200 meters on each side.
A stamping machine was in the middle and then the barrels were taken, well actually kicked
by your foot to one side or the other of the storage building. There were about 300 barrels to
stack onto of each other. Finally, the wagon came, we would open the door, and we would roll
the barrels into the wagon. As I already mentioned this train was called “Věrtuška.” So this was
the process of the tower.
Were there any other ways the ore that contains uranium was processed?
When I was speaking about the square there was something we called the “poor grinder” or
“grinder three.” Big pieces of material were crushed here again and processed, but this process
was slow. It was ground, separated, and put into the bunkers. From here it was manually
loaded into wagons by shovels. The high quality iron ore that was being processed in the camp
9 This tower was called “The Tower of Death.” It still stands in North-West Bohemia, close to Jáchymov.
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