"It was February, you know, full of militias everywhere. And we were running around there. Then Zápotocký, the president, came here, and there was much celebration. There were miners on the front drilling and making the gallery, but this was it again, there were people running with the carts. The carts were tied to the shaft, so we turned on the carts, and it was only four at best, and we made fifteen of them with Honza at the time to make it easier. And we didn't know there was such a big cliff to the shaft, and it slipped. We tried to slow it down and it passed us and it fell into the sloping, on number five. It was still lucky that there was a manager, Mr. Sirotek, that he stood up for us, we thought, they would lock us up now, because it was in February and they were looking for some sabotage."
Josef Cihelka was born in 1927 in Mokrovraty near Dobříš, where his father owned a grocery shop. He attended a primary school in Mokrovraty and a secondary school in Nový Knín. He trained in business manuals, passed exams in Prague in a shop near Kulík. At the end of the Second World War in 1945, he had to start forced labor to dig trenches in the vicinity of Židlochovice and Nosislav in the Southern Moravia, but he managed to escape with a friend and returned home safely. After the war, he worked in a shop in Dobříš, remembering food packages from UNRRY, in which, for example, peanut spreads or fish in oil were hidden. He also met his wife at Dobříš, they got married and had three children together. In 1948, Josef Cihelka joined the uranium mines in Příbram, working on shafts 5 and 6 as a runner, who was in charge of loading the trucks. However, due to an accident, he quit his job and returned to the store, which he enjoyed and became his lifelong job. He worked in Jednota, ran a store in Nový Knín and Borotice. He liked to travel, but only got to the countries of the former Eastern bloc. Today he is a widower and at the time of the filming of the interview he lived in the elderly home in Březové Hory.
