Ladislav Dosedla

"I was in the street opposite the town hall, where there were tanks surrounded by students. I also climbed on one tank. And one student asked a Russian what they would do if we took out our guns and went after them. The Russian just looked at the [city hall] tower and said, 'Boom, and the tower wouldn't be there.' I took it as a joke. They came to make order. But the Russians said they came to beat the fascists. I heard it with my own ears. They said there were fascists here. I thought, 'Well, they've come and will be gone again.' It wasn't just the Russians. The Poles were here, the Romanians, the Hungarians, the whole of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance [RVHP]. I wasn't traumatized by it, but it's a fact that some people took it too seriously. When I came for my shift, the vast corridor at Red October [Mine] was completely packed. I said to myself, 'What's going on?' The director was standing on the stairs to the showers, he had a microphone and he started saying that it was a dangerous situation, but he would like us to go down the shaft. He wanted us to take it as if nothing was going on. There was a foreman, I can't remember his name, but he had studied to be a parish priest. I guess he had some problems, ended up in the mine and he was a foreman. He literally chased the manager away from the microphone: 'You'd like it if they blew off the tower and we would stay down. Nowhere! There will be no going down the shaft.' So we didn´t go down. It was more or less a strike. I was very young, I was 19 years old. If nobody was going down the shaft, I wasn't going either."

"No mining, no plan was being met. Unfortunately. In the end, they [the mine bosses] decided to try with me. However, the team was upset after three previous foremen, they took everything as a joke. I had no choice but to tighten my grip. I told them straight out: 'A month. And if it doesn't work, I'm out and I'm out of the team altogether, and you guys can do whatever you want.' In the end, I remained there until retirement, even though I was removed several times.Because I wasn't in the [Communist] Party and they didn't like it. They threatened me several times that if I didn't join them, they would cancel my posisition. I heard such talk from the production deputy, for example. I didn't care. 'Feel free to cancel me.' They tried a couple of times, but it only lasted a few hours. When nothing was poured into a carriage, they knew it was bad, so they called it off again. And so my career went up until I retired, or rather until the shaft closed down."

"I was the last male alternative from my family who could stay there [in the cooperative farm- JZD]. I would have liked to stay there because I quite enjoyed the agricultural work. I was handy and they knew it, so they wanted me. They told me to go and study something. They even offered that I could study to be an accountant or even a livestock specialist. I didn't have any special results at school. I never had to repeat a year, but it was nothing special. I was offered all kinds of things, but with the condition that I would stay in the farm after completing my apprenticeship or school. And I didn't want that. I applied to become a machine smith in Brno at Zbrojovka. They did not allow me to go there. They said they didn't need a machine smith. And at that time there were only two options. Either you went to the army, they couldn´t do anything about that, or you went to a shaft. They couldn´t do anything about that, too. So I stole a march on them, and to this day I haven´t regretted it."