Vojtěch Kříž

"This is my home," he smiles as he opens the door of the small wooden depot.

An orange mining locomotive rests here over the winter and knocks three times. It's their greeting. This is Vojtěch Kříž's eighth year working at the Příbram Mining Museum - and this is the story that brought him here.

I come from Radetice. It's a small village a stone's throw from Milín. I'm not mentioning Milín for no reason, I just transferred here from Stěžov in primary school. That's a stone's throw from Radetice. When I graduated from primary school, I became an electrician in Březové Hory. Then I spent two years repairing and welding what I could, the usual routine. And then came the war.

The first year was really hard, but everyone who was there knew that. The second year they made me a T-54 tank instructor. Then I came back and started working in the ore mines, but it wasn't worth the few flak, so I switched to uranium. First I repaired mine machinery, then I worked on the dredging. Terrible work. I had the opportunity to meet political prisoners at Shaft 16. These prisoners were fair guys, easy to talk to and work with. But after '68, that all changed. The political prisoners had to leave, and ordinary torturers came to work.

Speaking of the '80s. The day before the occupation I was with a girl, who was really beautiful by the way, in a cinema in Pribram. They were showing two parts of Cleopatra with Burton and Taylor. I got home around midnight and went to bed. My alarm went off around 4:30, but I didn't feel like getting out of bed yet, so I turned on the radio and went to bed for a while. But before five o'clock the radio stopped playing, so I asked myself: "What happened?" And then it came.

The radio said that the occupation had come. I immediately jumped on the pioneer and went to work, where the night shift was over. A big roshambo, yes. So we decided to strike. "We won't give an ounce of uranium to the occupiers!" We protested, but none of us really knew what was going to happen. So we switched off the transformers and chargers and decided to do a kind of joint parade through Pribram. We didn't work for a week, but then it all turned around and everything was different.

I moved down to mining and started on the 24th floor on the trench. It was hard work. Humidity around 90%, temperature 35 to 40°C. It was a real galley. And then there was the excavation. At the time, they were digging shaft 11A from the 15th floor to the 21st floor. Then shaft 16 was dug, which was completed in 1976 and was an incredible 1,838 metres deep. I personally fired the last shot there at a depth of less than two kilometres. And then the individual floors started to be made.

It was dangerous work, I tell you. A lot of guys died doing it. Some were killed by falling rock, some by carbon monoxide suffocation. The worst part was when one of them got out of breath and fell to the ground, and the other one tried to help him, but he got out of breath too, and they were both left behind.

I was lucky until then, but it came to me one day too. It was November 6, 1977. A rock fall. That's the death knell. I was in a really bad way, I was in the hospital for a long time. Luckily, I got out of it, but I never went back to surfing. After the accident, I only worked on shaft 13, where the compressors were. I worked there until I retired.

You know, working in the mines was really hard and demanding, but I still remember it fondly. I met the best bunch of people I've ever known. Together we were able to take it and do a good job. They were the best guys I've ever met.

Some people would think I must be sick of it, but working there took me back to my youth. I'm now kept company by a great bunch of people and a little machine called Emmi, which I named after my granddaughter. Well, instead of driving, I drive the kids around in the car.

■ Text: Zdeněk Kubát and Karel Kraus, photo: Karolina Ketmanová