In the Death Camp

In November 1951, Vlastimir Maier, who was only eighteen years old at that time, was put into a prison work camp called Camp XII that was affiliated with the uranium mines in Horní Slavkov. The conditions in the camp were terrible and the prisoners often dubbed it the death camp. Two months prior to Vlastimir Maier’s arrival, eleven prisoners attempted to escape. In the end, only two of them survived and as a consequence tightened surveillance was enforced in the camp. The prisoners going to shafts were tied together with a rope, so that they could not run away. “If the first row tripped, every one fell down. There were fifty, sixty people tied up together.” After their shifts, the prisoners were often forced to stand in formation for many minutes, despite the fact that it was freezing and their clothes was wet. “During the winter, it was really a disaster. Sometimes, our rubber boots were full of water. The shafts were partly flooded, so we were wet all the time. And outside, it was twenty degrees centigrade below zero, sometimes even more.” Vlastimir Maier recalls that the political prisoners were constantly being terrorized by the guards. Prisoners were placed in correction cells even for misdemeanor. It was a tiny concrete cell, and the prisoners would get completely frozen in there. Not only were they terrorized, but although they performed hard manual work, the food portions were insufficient. “We were really hungry there in the XII; that was awful. We used to go by the kitchen and look for rotten potatoes. But there were about fifty prisoners searching that waste dump, so even a rotten potato was hard to find.”