“And what all did I have to go through when crossing the borders, when I wanted to get into the Protectorate! Often enough I had to swing over the River Odra. I enjoyed going to the cinema in Ostrava, but that was already Protectorate territory. Whereas Koblov, where I lived, was in the Reich. It was okay when I had a permit. I would show the permit to the local gendarmes, they were mostly local gaffers. I often went with the permit, even late in the evening. The old gendarmes didn’t care, but one time their German commander waited for me, and in a fury he ripped my permit to pieces, and also wrote into the records that they should not issue me with a new one. He was a right bastard. So when I wanted to go to the cinema, I had to secretly swim over the Odra.”
“And then they took us to Richard in Litoměřice. It was terrible there. We slept in a former stable. We were covered in millions of lice and their eggs. I had to shake them off every morning. When one of the prisoners died, they would be pushed off their bunk to the floor and carried out in the morning. A lot of people died there of typhus. They even had a hospital. If they took someone there, he never came back. There was a morgue in the cellar, they put the dead bodies there. We were digging shafts for a future underground factory. One underground factory was already finished back then, and it was producing, but I don’t know what. They said it was some secret weapon V1 or V2. But I don’t know. We had to be there, our kapo put us there. Sometimes below ground, sometimes digging on the surface. That was a terrible camp. Then they started transported Jews there, when the Germans were already on the run. We were lucky that they didn’t shoot us all.”
“After the factory was bombed, the prisoners had to remove the bombs which hadn’t detonated. We built air-raid bunkers by the factory, and when there was a bombing run, our wardens - mainly for their own sake - herded us into lorries, and we would drive away from the factory. And one time the raid surprised us right inside one of the unfinished bunkers. We were hit twice. It was an awful boom, the bunker was all aflame. And everyone was okay. Yet it wasn’t finished yet, it was just a plain concrete construction. It was missing the layer of slag on top, which was supposed to soften the impact of the bomb, so that the explosion would only hit the slag.”
“We didn’t have money, so I started working in Jáchymov, in the uranium mines. There was good money to be had there at the time. I worked with the ore for two years in the mines. I didn’t have anyone to help me in the beginning. Back then they had captive Germans doing forced labour there. And it happened that some of them escaped. Brotherhood Shaft was connected all the way to Marian Shaft, which had an exit. They escaped that way. When spring came, they found some three of them frozen to death there. They had been fleeing in the winter and they had been stuck in a drift. Later on they released the other captives, but only into East Germany. And then the mukls came, those who were imprisoned by the Communists.”
“Then they took us to Königstein. First they put us in tents in a swamp while the new camp was being built further on in the forest. Some of the [work] commandos would go to there to build the camp, some of them would go to the Elbe, where the Dresden railway line was located and where they were supposed to construct hidden underground factories in the steep rocky inclines. We cleared out the bushes there. And when we were returning back up, the weak prisoners, muselmanns they were called, sometimes they couldn’t go on and they dropped to the down, and the kapos beat them dead and knocked them down. We helped or carried some of them all the way back to the camp. And in the mornings during roll call, if someone didn’t manage to stay standing, the kapos would beat them till they couldn’t get up no more.”
Vlastimil Budina was born in 1927, into a Czech family in Hrušov near Ostrava. Because his father worked at the railways, his family often had to move, until they settled down permanently in Koblov. When the Sudetes were annexed, the village became a part of the German Reich. When he was sixteen, Vlastimil spent a month in prison because someone informed the officials that he had broken into an abandoned gamekeeper’s lodge. He was then sent to forced labour in Germany, to the Hermann-Göring-Werke factory in Watenstedt. He took part in sabotaging the munitions production, a failed escape attempt landed him in the concentration camps in Buchenwald, Böhlen, and Königstein. He helped build air-raid bunkers and build up the labour camp in Königstein. In March 1945 he was transferred to the concentration camp in Litoměřice, where he worked on the construction of the underground factory Richard. He was liberated in what is now the Polish town of Kamienna Góra. He set off home with a friend by foot all the way to Northern Moravia. After the war she worked as a civil employee of the Jáchymov Mines, and then as a tile layer until his retirement. Vlastimil Budina passed avay on 2015.
