“It was terrible because there was a mix of people there, so for instance, the sweeper in the workshop - because he was to weak for anything else - was a gentleman who had been head clerk at the Business Bank. And because he was still employed, because when he worked at the bank he was a respected head clerk, so they told him: ‘No no, don’t you think of retiring, you’ll go work there now.’ Fortunately, a number of the old workers who had been there before we came, although Communists, were quite ordinary, decent people, and they reckoned there was no use putting this man to work at a machine somewhere, he might fall into something and come to a bad end... So he swept the floors.”
“Well, and one time it happened that the moment we arrived, it was, this one chap, we came back from the tour, he went into the cabin, took a bag, not a very big one, right, but he probably acted nervous and they were trained to notice it. Well, and so he walked all the way up to the steps - the port was just two metres below us, with an Italian carabiniere patrolling to and fro. Well, and the men, one of them, called out at him: ‘Show us what you have in that bag.’ Well, the chap turned pale. He threw the bag down and then followed suit himself. The carabiniere rushed up, of course, [the chap] threw himself around his feet and cried: ‘Asylum! Asylum!’”
“For the most part we didn’t do anything because we didn’t have the components. We’d have the parts for half of the assembly, say, but something was missing from the rest. So it was stored in some workshop, then we got another one, we did a part of it again, and it was sent off again to wait for when we had the material. But we didn’t get any, of course, and it got worse and worse.”
Nina Heřmanová, née Dolejší, was born on 12 February 1928 in Prague-Holešovice. Her father, Vojtěch, had a joiner’s workshop there, her mother, Marie, worked in the neighbouring shop. Nina attended business academy. She was assigned to forced labour in 1944 and so did not graduate until after the war. In 1946 she found employment at the Printing Works of the Industrial Union, later renamed to Industrial Publishing. In 1950 she married Karel Heřman. As the daughter of a small businessman, she was targeted for the “77,000 For Production” initiative in 1951 and was forced to work at ČKD Stalingrad, where she helped produce power plant generators. In 1953 she gave birth to a daughter, Markéta. The only way to escape the factory was through extended maternity leave. In the late 1950s she found a job at the travel agency Čedok, where she organised trips to other Socialist countries and acted as a tour guide. In 1962 she gave birth to another daughter, Martina. In 1971 she began working at the Customs Office of the Ministry of Foreign Trade, and in her free time she wrote guide books about Yugoslavia. She still writes articles for the website Chorvatsko.cz.
