František Vaczula

"And then it started. The guardsmen appeared. I would not wish that for anyone. Signs on the walls and fences such as ´Hungarians over the Danube!´, ´Jews to gas chambers!´ ´Cechs on foot to Prague!´ appeared. And it all started. I was just a child. The guardsmen wore uniforms, polished boots and pants called ´rajtky´. On Sundays they assembled in front of the Salesian Church; the young (Hlinka Youth) separated from the old (Hlinka Guardsmen). They went to pray. They were so mighty that each afternoon they were able to stop people in the street and check on their identity. And when the person was found to be German or Hungarian they would just beat him up. It looked as if he did not belong to Slovakia. I did not like their going to church and beating people up for no reason. They appeared almighty. One had to be careful not to speak other than Slovak. I did not know what fascism was back then; now I do. So when walking through the town whether a child or a grown-up, one had to be cautious."

"Then the freight cars loaded with cement arrived. It did not matter if it was morning, noon or mignight. We had to unload immediately not to pay penalties. So there were nights we unloaded all night. We brought it to the warehouse on a kind of carts. It was dusty. We worked our fingers to the bone in Líně. But there were mates, a musician or a priest, we really felt sorry for. It makes a difference because I come from a village and was used to working hard with my hands but some did not know know what a shovel was. It was really bad. There was an officer out there and when the men went to the infirmary he was waiting outside saying ´What is the matter with you?´and when he saw the patient wasn´t dying he said ´To work! I will fix you up!´...Life was hard in Líně."

"There were mates that did nothing wrong to anyone; they were innocent. Only due to their parents having had some fortune or to their religion conviction, they were placed to the camp. So they were poor things; when we talked together in our rooms we could not believe they could do such things to us. To make matters worse, rumors had it that when we were all completed with the work they would take us to Russia. You can imagine how we felt. There could have been some truth in it as all the work we did was run by Russians. The construction supervisors were Slovak and Czech but the Russians controlled everything. So we were seriously concerned they would take us to Russia."

"It is hard to imagine when we were to unload gravel so we could build roads...we were given shovels but it makes a difference if you get one with a sharp tip, that could more less work; but those with the square ones had it much harder. And some mates even cried as they got such blisters whether using gloves or not that they weren´t able to cut a slice of bread. Some went to the infirmery; it was something terrible. And when it started freezing, things got much worse; we had to break it with pickaxes first right in the freight car."