Christian Mayer

* 1923

  • “I went there one time before, right before the currency reform, the first one, and doctor Votava went there with us. We called him Pixie. He was a former Boy Scout, too, and he was a doctor and he served as a coroner who examined the corpses when somebody drowned. We jokingly called him ‘corpse-eater.’ He bought all the alcohol they had from some pub in Týn nad Vltavou, and he buried the bottles on Sejcký Island. When we went there about a year later, the water level rose so much that the island was half-submerged in water, and the trees that had been there had been cut down. He was running all over the island with a hoe, trying to find some of the bottles. He eventually found one, but he broke it with the hoe. We thus drank the contents on the spot and that was the end of it. The investment of his money into alcohol really has not worked well for him.”

  • “It was led by one of our friends, a guy who was a kayak paddler from one Smíchov club. My dad was making models of ships, many of them. At that time he was working on a ship for which he needed about forty small cannons, and I thus used the brass to make about forty small cannons, and this guy, this friend of mine, told me: ‘Man, we will probably get shot for this, because you have used so much brass.’ I told him: ‘This is war production what I am doing here!’ He was rushing all over the factory floor to get hold of some more brass to make it correctly. I still have some of those small cannons at home. I finished them. I used them to create various model cannons for ships.”

  • “I went to work on the construction of the Intelligence Bridge, where I told them that I was a carpenter and they thus hired me as a carpenter, but then did a different job… After about a month, I started doing underwater work in caissons. We were building the four caissons that are in the foundations of the Intelligence Bridge. The deepest one under Barrandov is interesting, it is built in the depth of thirty metres. The pressure down there is three atmospheres, and the work shifts were arranged accordingly. Our salary was a bit higher than the top manager’s salary, and we were being paid very well, but there were other guys who could not stand this kind of work for too long and they left. The work then finished and I continued doing underwater work in caissons in the Lipno water reservoir for some time.”

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    loděnice, 15.05.2015

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    duration: 58:54
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
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My whole life was over water

Christian Mayer
Christian Mayer
photo: Pamět národa - Archiv

Christian Mayer, a.ka. Punťa, was born in 1923 in Prague-Podolí. He grew up in close contact with the Water Sports Club, which was founded by his father in 1924. During the Protectorate period, he studied a trade academy and a secondary technical school, and he was doing conscripted labour in a factory in Prague-Modřany which produced aircraft parts. He took part in the Prague Uprising. After the war he briefly worked in the State Bank and he did not join the Communist Party. Subsequently he worked for two years in the mine Fierlinger 2. He was working on the construction of the so-called Intelligence Bridge in Prague. His life-long hobby is water sports.