Vladimír Zobal

"As a ten year old boy I lived with my family in Komárno town. My father was employed as a taxman. At that time Hungarian army came and occupied this part of Slovakia. A great uproar arose among Czech population from that. Roman Catholic priests in a church, which was next to our house, held the masses services for crowded audience, but not only that - there were hundreds of people standing outside in front of the church. The entire crowd was singing, but it looked like people were mumbling. The Czechs were afraid that it might come to the looting, but fortunately this never happened. After some while my father managed to get a wagon and we moved little up to the north to Malacky town. Before we could settle down the same situation occurred also in Malacky. The Slovak state was being established and again: there was a seminar; a lot of Seminarians organized such incitement against the Czechs and Jews. They even painted about a meter high black bugs and skulls on Jewish houses or places where some Jews lived. We were afraid too, because now all of my Slovak friends were suddenly against me. I never knew - will I get beaten up or not. So far everything went good. Also from Malacky we managed to move away on time. The seminarians and catholic priests used to walk through the town shouting: ´Czechs go away to Prague! Czechs, go away to Prague! ´ You could never know what the feral crowd may bring."

"I got to the Ležnice pit. They assigned me to the party which was pulling the carts from the cage back to the workplace. There were many of workplaces like this all around the pit, because, as the ore in the volcanic activity poured into the rock, it was utterly branched and not only on the flat but the hills and hollows, so there was a terrain on which you can’t even imagine. Now imagine me - battered yard bird...So I went down to work; my buddy - Slovak and coincidently also from Bardejov town understood my weakness, but the rule was to pull fifteen empty carts back to our workplace and then again fifteen carts pull back down to the cages. It was really tough...There was one sort of hill in the pit that I had to push the carts using my back, so I could manage to get it up to the hill. I don’t know maybe ten or fifteen meters. I was afraid that I won’t be able to push it anymore after they loaded with stones. I couldn’t imagine how heavy it could be, but they told me it was about three quarters of cubic meters. Our foreman came to me and said: ´Look, you will have to slow it down a little.´ He gave me this iron rod that was used for drilling. The cart itself used to have some sort of U-shaped iron device between the wheel and the end of the bottom of the cart, and now I was supposed to stick this iron rod into this metal thing on the bottom to slow the carts as desired. I had to step on the rod more or less regarding how fast the cart was going. I had to be very careful, especially at the turns. It was unbelievably difficult job for us to put the cart on the rail again after it slipped down of it. So the crucial places were the turns and the switches; there we had to go as slow as we could. I managed to take the cart to the cage; I took another empty one and went back up to the hill again. I don’t even know if I have fulfilled the quota on the first day. But because the other men from my group were usually working over the norm, they covered my deficiencies."

"When I finally decided where to start that morning, the door into the lab opened and three gentlemen walked in: ´Are you Mr. Zobal?´ They put me into old Tatra car and brought me to Bartolomějská Street in Prague, where the former State Secret Police investigating office was and also the prison. Originally it was the nunnery; the nuns used to live there in single cells or two of them in one cell. So it was now suitable for turning it into a prison. There they wanted me to tell them things I had no idea about. Of course they didn’t like it. They would put me into the dark cell without windows. The guard was coming regularly knocking on the tin door with his keys; he turned the light on and I had to get up and announce myself as ´A08567´. Then he turned the lights off again and I could lie down again. I had nothing but a mattress. It took a while before another guard came and took me to the investigator. He was asking me questions I wasn’t able to answer. Only at the court I found out with who I was actually in the prison. Even today, I still don’t know why they put me to jail. The investigator kept asking me questions I couldn’t answer; some little things I knew, but not the major things. Like that we wanted to blow up the bridge or to destabilize the Republic. How on Earth could I possibly want to do that? But they just didn’t want to hear the truth. They wrote it all down and made me sign it. Then the court hearing came. Only then I met the whole party. I knew only two people out of twelve. The rest of them were complete strangers to me. Everything I have signed - before I came to the curt - they warned me: ´If you won’t answer the same as what you have signed, you’ll go back to jail again.´ So what was I supposed to do? I repeated everything I have signed before and they sent me to jail for six years."