Alois Edr

* 1941

  • „We were on standby in Radvanice at the main mine rescue station. It used to be in Lazy (nowadays Orlová-Lazy), then we would be seated at Radvanice. We waited on standby for the whole week, just in case something happened. And when something happened, we would go there. They said we were going someplace where this and that happened. The operational officer had already known what was going on and what to take along. And once they summoned us to the Fučík mine. It’s not operational any more, the shaft collapsed, I think, and there was a fire in one of the shafts. They sent us and off we went. From Karviná, we were used to seams [of coal and thus the height of the tunnels] of about three metres thick and we couldn’t find that place. We returned and some told us that it’s past a strip where there’s a water flowing. We had to go there. We carried our breathing apparatuses in front of us and went upwards with those and all our equipment up there. And there was that fire. The layer was some forty or fifty centimetres thik so we had to crawl. One guy was waiting for us there, Jan Balcar, he had such a big belly that he was not able to crawl through. We climbed up there, we were dripping wet because they were spraying it with water. The water was stirring and bubbling and we crawled through that water and there, past that, was that fire. [Note: translated verbatim, the spatial relations are unclear in the original.]”

  • „In the first year [of the mining school], we worked on the surface, we went only to have a look in the underground shafts. We worked in the lamp room, in the storage halls and so on. In the second year, we worked underground for two days a week, I think, and the rest was school. And in the third year, we went down the mine every day.” “It was tough, wasn’t it.” “I remember that in the Honegger shaft, that was a part of the First of May mine, the 23rd layer was low, we had to crawl there. We worked there when we were still apprentices.“

  • „We worked from dusk till dawn, that’s what I remember. When we were harvesting, when the harvest came, people from the village came to help out. Then they borrowed our horses in exchange. That’s how it was done. Only the folk from the village helped, otherwise we toiled by ourselves. I was fed up with that so when they came recruiting for miners, I quickly applied to run away from farming. The thing is, I had no other option beyond staying in farming or running away to mining. So I decided for the mines.”

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    Ostrava, 27.05.2021

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As a child of a kulak, I had no choice. Mining wasn’t that bad at the end

Alois Edr (far right) and his colleagues from the mine rescue. Karviná, around 1965
Alois Edr (far right) and his colleagues from the mine rescue. Karviná, around 1965
photo: Archiv pamětníka

Alois Edr was born on the 2nd of June in 1941 in Zruč nad Sázavou in Central Bohemia. His parents were farmers, they owned around eighteen hectares of fields, two smaller pieces of forest, some meadows, eight cows and two horses. His father, Alois Edr the Elder, died of heart attack in 1950. During the collectivisation in the 1950’s, the family property was taken over by the State Farm. Alois’ mother started to work in a factory. Alois wanted to study at a construction trade school but as a child from the so-called kulak family, he did not get a credential. He apprenticed as a miner in Karviná and he settled there. For thirty years, he worked as a mine rescuer. He worked during many tragic event in the Ostrava-Karviná mining area. In 2022, he lived in Karviná and he was an active member of miners’ folklore group, Barbora.