Czechoslovak Political Prisoners - über das Projekt Political ...

cause I was almost deaf. They put me on the main grinder. There was a lot of noise and no one
wanted to be there. With one ear I didn’t really mind it, so I was working there.
What did that mean?
In the tower we worked on the rock that contained a lot of iron that was brought by cars
where it was put in big boxes and from these put into smaller ones. The iron ore was measured
and according to its size it was sorted into these boxes. Out of the boxes two prisoners took it
out and threw it onto a big wide conveyor belt. When there was about fifty tons ready in one
big box, it was all crushed and processed as one load. From the bunker it went to the grinder
and was ground up. Then it was sent back up to the tower where the soft part was taken with
a sieve. The big part was falling back down into the grinder and this way it kept rotating until
everything was ground. Meanwhile, the soft-seated fraction was barreled. The barrels were
then stored and once every two or three days, depending on how it went, it was always put into
about thirty wagons. Half of these wagons were loaded with poor iron ore. They also brought
low quality ore in open wagons, which was only sorted and the loads on different cars were
being mixed into big containers that would fill a wagon. That made fifteen to twenty tons. The
high quality iron ore was processed how I described in the tower and was loaded into closed
wagons.
What exactly did you do with the grinder and what were the conditions like?
I had to make sure a stone wouldn’t get stuck and one of the two slabs couldn’t crack. The
grinder consisted of two huge slabs that were grinding against each other. In between those
the rocks were falling down and been crushed. There was a lot of dust and noise. You could
hardly see anything there especially when the rock or material was dry. Usually it was dry and
they stored fifty tons of it. In the storage boxes it was drying very quickly. Of course in depended
on the weather, for example during the fall it was wetter, but then it got dry again. That
was a nonstop operation. That means three shifts each for eight hours. Everything else was
managed according to this. According to that and to which shift you worked, that’s what the
routine looked like, right. Everyone except for the night shift was getting up with the morning
shift that was at 5:15 or something like that. The loaf of bread was split in thirteen slices so you
would get about 15 decagrams of bread a day (0.33 pounds). Hunger was terrible in the beginning
until Stalin and Gottwald’s deaths. The hunger was so terrible until the cult of personality
started and then it got a little better. I didn’t even weigh 50 kilograms (110 pounds). You must
consider that I was 15 centimeters taller then I am right now because I’ve gotten shorter now.
I was a relatively young man and we all looked like this.
What did you wear for work? Did you have any gloves or masks?
We wore what we normally lived in. We wore something called, “Halina,” which was made
from a higher quality of sack or bag material. We had trousers in this fashion and also a jacket.
We had one long pair of underwear underneath, a shirt, and a hat. Beside that we got linen
pants and a linen jacket for summer. That was everything. We didn’t have anything else. We
didn’t have any special working uniforms because those idiots thought that all these working
places on the surface weren’t radioactive. They didn’t even admit it was radioactive down below
in the shafts. Sometime in 1954 or 1955 they brought us some air masks, but those were for
little kids. You really couldn’t breath in those. So when it was very dusty we were using damp
clothes and we covered our nose and mouth and tied them behind our heads. That was all. We
didn’t get any other care.
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