Czechoslovak Political Prisoners - über das Projekt Political ...

How long were you on the grinder?
After one month all working positions rotated, but that didn’t mean that everyone went
everywhere. One had to get some practice with the grinder and find out when he can push
it, when not to, and when you should stop things for a while. Of course I couldn’t stop it very
often because there were guards, Russians. There were a minimum of Czech employees and
all of them who were Czech, were not doing any manual work. They were either bosses, but
there were many of them or they were guards. So I didn’t go to throw the iron ore to containers
very often because I never really liked working with shovels, not that I couldn’t learn it, but
there were people who liked shoveling more then me. So in our group we were switching the
positions a little bit. Our group had about thirty people and we formed the staff of the tower.
For example, one of us wasn’t able or well handed to roll the barrels. We were rolling the
barrels through the storage and that was about 150 meters long. The barrel or a bucket with
a lid was rolling when you kicked it well. We had hooks to give them direction and then to lift
them up because three barrels were stored on top of each other. Not many people could do it
really well, so it was better if someone went to do something else then break his legs trying
to do this. Each barrel had to weigh a minimum of 60 kilograms (132 pounds). All barrels were
weighed. So I can’t really tell you how long I was at the grinder, but it was at least a third of
the time I was in prison. That means a third out of three and a half years.
How many people do you think lost their lives there or left with permanent health effects?
I suppose that all of us had some permanent health effects. Those who worked down in the
deep holes, who were digging out the iron ore and those who all worked on “L” had to have
some health damage for sure. It wasn’t documented anywhere. One had to stay in these radioactive
zones for the effects to be apparent. That is a diametrically different mechanism of
damage then for example an explosion of nuclear weapons. You can’t really compare them as
they are different. The illness you get from being exposed to uranium radioactivity looks different.
No one really knows how it looks. In the time when they were supposed to study it, no
one really did it. That means that all these examinations are done post factum with a long time
lapse. They started examining it in the seventies. That was with a twenty-year lapse.
Was it called “A Tower of Death” according to the mortality rate?
I don’t know if we can say mortality. That didn’t really occur there because while you are
exposed to the radioactivity there is some time of latency when the changes in the organism
happen. These changes are gradual and each organism individually reacts to it. For each person
it comes out in a different a way. Only if they examined a certain amount of people, at least
thousands of people could they identify these trends. No one ever did that, although an obligation
existed at Jáchymov from the second half of the 1930’s. During the first Czechoslovakian
Republic they were measuring the activity, taking measurements in the mines, and checking
the employees. So the Communists knew very well where they were sending us. There were
no questions marks about these things and there were already rules for this under the Department
of Health and Human Services. No one took this into consideration and everyone was
pretending that nothing serious was happening and that there were no potential risks.
How was it with injuries? Were you ever injured?
With injuries it was really disastrous because there was one nursing room for the whole
camp. There was one room for a nurse’s room and another room with four beds where the
injured could stay. The doctor who served there was a vindictive prisoner and he was a real
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