A dangerous town

In 1944, Miloslav Šafrán was assigned to forced labor in the former town of Heydebreck in Upper Silesia, where he had to build wooden houses in a camp for the workers of the industrial chemical plants of IG Farben AG. The factory employed several thousands of employees and a large number of prisoners. The town became the target of several major Allied air raids. “Heydebreck was drilled. There was probably not a single square meter of the town that remained intact. There were air-raid shelters on the roadside that looked very much like a bomb. They were on average about two and a half meters wide. You would lift it up and hide underneath it,” recalls Miloslav Šafrán, who experienced several raids hidden in a three-story air-raid bunker. “The German elite had the privilege of hiding at the bottom, the employees in the middle and the prisoners or the slave laborers – like us - were at the top. Even the bunkers were not 100% safe. The Allies dropped heavy bombs on the town. As the bomb slid off the bunker and exploded two meters away from it, the pressure from the explosion shifted the whole shelter by a meter. It was packed in there and sometimes there even wasn’t enough space for all. Those who were sitting directly next to the wall had their ribs broken by it. They were badly hurt,” he recalled.