“I was almost at the end, and so I walked back on the railroad sleepers. And I saw it all: train cars scattered everywhere. And there was a crater and inside there was a… sticking out from the dirt… I have never seen anything like that. What is it? I thought. What is it? Then it occurred to me that it could be an unexploded bomb… I tiptoed back and got out of there! And there was another one, and another over there, away! The steam locomotive was there, and the pipes were protruding from it, it was horrible. And then I reached those labour camps there, as I told you. All of them were out there, and I eventually found him there. But he said, man, I cannot go back to the camp, we have a bomb there.”
“And so I asked him where it was. They sent me into that door and a fat man was sitting there, with golden jewellery everywhere: ‘Heil Hitler!’ What do you want? I told him and I said that I had already been there for a long time and that I received a replacement and that I should go home. He looked at me and yelled: ‘What do you mean? Soldiers are on the front, and they cannot go home either!’ He shouted at me: ‘Anyway, do you have a permission to go to the headquarters?’ I didn’t have anything, I had run away. But I could not tell him this. Christ, well, I got out of there pretty quickly.”
“I got to the fields and I saw a marshalling railway yard in the distance. I thought that I would go there and look what it looked like there. I thus walked over those fields and there was some factory there. All of a sudden I could hear some roar. I looked up and I counted about ten or eleven of them. I thought, if they start now, I might get hit right away. And before I even thought about it, it started slamming around me. I was looking where to go and several guys ran out from that factory and there was a kind of a balk and a hole. I ran there. They had a tunnel dug out there and the men followed me there.”
Jan Jindra was born on June 30, 1924 in the village Hrob (Teplice district, called Klostergrab at that time). His father Vratislav worked for the State Railway Company as a stoker on a steam locomotive. His mother Aurelie, a Sudeten German, was a housewife. Jan spent his childhood in the predominantly German-speaking part of the Sudeten region. Since his sisters were already married to Sudeten German men, they decided to remain there even after the German takeover of this border region in October 1938. The rest of the family moved to Louny. While there, Jan completed his vocational training as a machine fitter. In 1943 he was drafted to Germany to do forced labour there and he was employed in Paderborn and Göttingen. He worked in factories of the German Reich Railways. Jan spent the last days of the war in the labour-training camp in Radeberg. He experienced air raids and bombardment and nearly perpetual hunger. He returned to his homeland in the middle of April 1945. After the war he passed an examination as a steam locomotive driver and he worked in this position until the 1960s. Jan Jindra died on January 19, 2013.
