Franz Braun

"In the summer of '45 in Žacléř, they showed films [about what the Germans did], how there were concentration camps and so on. And we had to go to the film and come the next day - once a month we had to turn in [tickets] that we had been to the film. Otherwise, we wouldn't get food stamps. But you know how it was. My dad used to say, 'You're not going, why would we go to the movies? Now there's work, we're going to dry hay.' We didn't care. But then we went to get food stamps and didn't get them that month. Well, we didn't starve to death because of it. We only couldn't afford sugar. We had butter, cheese and milk, we had our own. So we survived."

"Then they got used to it, and I could move - in '68 and '69. But I didn't have an immigration passport. They would have taken me in. I could have moved to Bavaria to live with my uncle. He arranged everything there. But it was too late. Then Husák came, who was in the government, and he didn't let anyone into Germany. So we stayed here." - "But you wanted to leave?" - "I wanted to leave for my sons. I didn't care anymore. But it was a lot of work to get out. You had to have permission from the military administration. We weren't allowed to go to the West for six or seven years after the war. You couldn't go anywhere back then. When you applied for a passport to go somewhere, you had to go through all the authorities, and they made difficulties everywhere."

"They had the chief write that I should not work on the shaft, that I was a priority patient. But I went to Jáchymov - Horní Slavkov with it, and they said: 'This doesn't apply to us, you'll get another job, but we can't let you leave.'"

"I had a cough many times. I couldn't breathe. Every time they disbanded us, I fell. So the head of the camp, the lagerführer, said: 'We'll take you to Karlovy Vary, where you'll go to the hospital for an X-ray.' So they took me to the hospital, and they didn't find anything. They said I was a malingerer. But the lagerführer saw that I was really bad, and the next day, he said: 'Please, that's impossible, you can't breathe at all, and you're coughing. You know what, I'll write you a pass, go home to Žacléř. If you're going to die, you can at least die at home."

"It's lucky that my brother and I were on shift together. I got out of the car, and there were two cops already there. As soon as I said my license plate number was 505, I reported 505, handed over my lamp, and when they heard 505, they picked me up. The guys were talking in the bathroom about what I did again, and they kept watching me so I couldn't run away. Then my brother came home and said they picked me up."

"The workers always came in the morning, and my mother made coffee so they could have something warm. I had to do all the running around. 'Franz, go and call the woods and tell them to come for coffee.' So I had to run, it was a few steps into the woods, and there I said, 'Koffe ist fertich!'" ('Coffee is ready!' in Krkonoše dialect)