Jan Vývoda

"And then we were simply taken to the military. The group that I was a part of went to Libava. Only later did we find out that the unit to which we had been assigned was an auxiliary technical battalion. It was in fact a sort of a labor camp. So it had nothing to with the defense of our country but our weapons were a pickaxe and a shovel. It was completely illegal and they later found out about it in the archives. These battalions were established by minister Čepička, who was the son-in-law of president Gottwald. Even the draft to these units was carried out in a very strange way. By a strange twist of fate, I was part of a community that didn't have too much to complain about. We were treated rather decently but that was usually not the case and a lot of people did get into other camps they had to work very hard since the beginning. Another interesting feature of the camp was that we weren't given any money. Only those who were 30% above the target got some money and the targets were, of course, set in such a way as to make it impossible."

"The way they treated you during the totalitarian regime and during the war was very much different. Cardinal Trochta told me that it was incomparable. He was in Mauthausen and there, he only survived by a miracle. He was shot by some commandant and taken on a pushcart to the crematorium where he woke up and managed to drag himself to the infirmary. There he met a doctor who was an inmate himself. That doctor restored him to health and provided him with a new name and number. He survived and later, he met the officer who had shot him. He recognized him and he was already about to pull his gun on him when the alarm sounded and he had to run away. He survived by sheer coincidence. Despite of this, he used to say that what he went through during the rule of the totalitarian regime was much worse. The torture was sometimes so bad that he wished for it to be over."