Jan Šefl

* 1922  †︎ 2014

  • “I didn’t go down into the caisson. And then it was why. There were seven of us there. And they said: ‘Hey, where were you?’ And when we went up, I slipped in among the boys and even got a receipt. I didn’t have any foreman’s confirmation, but I got it. The second time I did it again, and the third time three or four people did it, and it was half empty. And there was an investigation, it was terrible. One boy came out from there and said: ‘Man, big trouble.’ I did it as well, so did this other chap. There were three or four of us who’d done it. And he said: ‘Man, they say they’ll lock us up.’ One boy named Hajník was locked up because of it. And when I saw that, I went to get Dolmetsch [an interpreter - ed.], one of the boys, a Czech boy who spoke German as well, and I told him: ‘Look, I skipped work. We have to say I was ill, that I had to leave, that the foreman wasn’t there at the time...’ That he’d swum up. They pulled the foreman out in those fifteen minutes. And they left us there, of course. ‘...and that I’d come out, that I was sick, and that I hadn’t returned after that.’ And they kept talking about it there, he explained the situation, and the German kept refusing, refusing, until at last he threw the confirmed ticket and said: ‘Raus!’ At me, at us, meaning, out! So I didn’t end up in the cooler, but the other boy, Hajník, he did. And do you know what kind of punishment they had for when you skipped work? A small cabin, concrete, concrete everywhere, and holes at the bottom. And water’d come it at various intervals. He was there for a week. Or ten days perhaps. The water flowed, he was exhausted, so he sat down, then the water flowed again. So he got up, but then he even slept in the water. It flowed beneath him. He said: ‘I wouldn’t do that again, it was a horror.’ He had to survive on bread and water.”

  • “I was also given the work of supplying bread with a German driver. We’d take some fifteen to sixteen hundred loaves from the German bakery. [...] The Russians were clearing the snow there. And we’d pass by with the bread, and because we had to stop, they smelt the bread from the car. They said: ‘Davay! Davay!’ I opened the back door, [...] I couldn’t help it - I threw them a loaf of bread. [...] They started fighting for it, with shovels. So I threw them another one. And there was trouble. There were some youngsters there, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old, who had guns; they were guarding the Russian captives, and they fired a shot. They didn’t fire at them though, not at them. We arrived, and they already had a report that this had happened. So they called us into the office of Front Führer Köln. He asked: ‘Who threw out that bread?’ We were silent. [...] So he said: ‘Very well, give them a military tribunal!’ So I stepped forward and said: ‘I did it.’ [...] He took me by the collar and began bashing me against the door. How come I gave them to our enemies? How come I had supported them?”

  • “And then they assigned me to work at a German submarine base. At first I worked outside. I never saw such a job before. Our group of about eight people was trained to work in a caisson. That was an iron dome with a diameter of 10 by 12 metres. We’d climb into it via the top using a ladder, and they sent compressed air there. We had to do like this [pull our auricles - ed.] so they could put the air in there. Twenty-three metres. That meant that the water had to be pushed out by pressure. Because those were caissons, that’s what it’s called. A caisson. And it sank because of its weight. But there was water under it. And we had to take the water out that was underneath it, seashells and all, and we sent it out via the chimney [muck tube - trans.]. That was a kind of chimney. We sent it up through the chimney. But also, one time what I experienced, when they pulled it up through the chimney, and then the chimney was dropped, it fell down, and the pressure, seeing that the boy was right beside it, it tore his lungs apart. Ripped his lungs up. The pressure became... and he was down there. We were give leave for that. As Czechs, we got time off because of it.”

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    Hvožďany, 21.04.2010

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A German military tribunal, that’s a bullet. That’s what I imagined

The photo of Jan Šefl when working in Norway
The photo of Jan Šefl when working in Norway
photo: Soukromý archiv

Jan Šefl was born on 22 June 1922 in the village of Hvožďany. He comes from the family of a disabled veteran of World War I. On 6 November 1942 he was sent to forced labour. He was taken from Prague to Berlin and then with other Czechs to Szczecin. The labourers worked briefly at the local shipyard, but they were soon reassigned to Norway. Jan Šefl worked at a submarine base in Trondheim and then in Narvik, first with a jackhammer and then in the supply section. By a number of lucky coincidences he avoided standing trial before a military tribunal for giving Russian POWs two loaves of bread. A false letter of confirmation claiming his father was severely ill allowed him to return to Hvožďany for a month in 1943. He never went back to Norway but instead hid in his native village until the end of the war. After 1945 he worked at a nearby quarry. He compiled his memories of forced labour in a book called Za války v Norsku (In Norway for the War). Jan Šefl died on September 17, 2014.