Václav Pek

* 1948

  • “That was terrible, how things got going. From Coronini all the way to this village the road was wet with motor oil [diesel], how they were pouring it into jerrycans. When my son went to the army in 95, we couldn’t even drive along the street it was blocked with those diesel cars, pouring and transferring. It was terrible. And then it started. There were so many boats hauling it. Then they needed boats, so the first thing I did was repair some engineer’s boat. I saw someone else do it and so I did it myself next. So I fixed one, then two, then they kept coming and I had to keep working on them. I did 22 of them [boats]. I made a lot of money, one boat cost 200 marks. That was one monthly wage in the mines. Just myself at home after work in three, four days I had a boat done. I made a lot of money at the time.”

  • “In 1968 I was in Bohemia and then I was a soldier. Things were still kind of tense, people were still talking about the revolution. When I came to the army, they recorded us, our nationality. I said I’m Czech, our nationality was Czech. When they heard I was Czech, the commanders called me Dubček.”

  • “I experienced it myself later. Before I retired, one bloke let some mine carts slip, if there hadn’t been those metal rods, they would’ve fallen on me. I was down the bottom and they let the carts slip, it was downhill in that mineshaft. So their mine carts came loose, there were about ten and there was a terrible bang, but I was saved because they didn’t fall all the way down on me, just rocks. We had helmets. I crouched by the rope and waited for it to fall on me. But I was safe, nothing happened. The whole time I was down in the mines, the place I was, about twenty victims, twenty lives were lost there. They called them ‘accidents’. Some were dead, some wounded. In twenty years, about twenty dead. It was dangerous. We’d left home and didn’t know if we’d come back from the mines. Three people from Svatá Helena died.”

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Svatá Helena, Rumunsko, 19.10.2021

    (audio)
    duration: 01:36:44
  • 2

    Svatá Helena, Rumunsko, 06.12.2021

    (audio)
    duration: 49:46
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

We went to the ore mines and didn´t know whether we return home to our families

Václav Pek in the cabinetmaker's shop
Václav Pek in the cabinetmaker's shop
photo: witness´s archive

Václav Pek was born on 19 July 1948 in the Czech village of Svatá Helena (Sfânta Elena) in Romania as the oldest son of Ferdinand and Anna Pek. He was given the name of his grandfather, who was trained as a carpenter in his youth and started a tradition that has been handed down in the family for four generations. The witness’ grandfather Václav fell on the battlefields of the First World War and so his son Ferdinand had to learn carpentry in Serbian Belgrade. But the young Václav learnt the craft of carpentry from his father. From 1974 onwards he worked in the nearby ore mines and completed twenty years of work. As a deacon he served in the local Unity of the Brethren Baptists congregation for a total of 18 years. His sons are continuing his carpenter’s trade and with the support of the Czech organisation People in Need they succeeded in establishing a carpenter firm in Svatá Helena in 2006. At the time of recording, the witness was living in Svatá Helena (October 2021).