Mgr. Miroslav Anton

"In Pilsen there was, let's say, an underground community where we all knew each other. And when we get to November 89, it's not surprising that we then met on that square or that we were the founders of the Civic Forum. There were maybe a few dozen of us living in a similar style in Pilsen. After all, the literature, the samizdat, the music records, the things I was talking about, must have reached people somehow. So they got them from someone they knew and with whom we knew we were on the same boat. And in that year 1983, one of the key activities that was going on in the underground community here in Pilsen was the Damil record evenings, which were organized by Milan Kohout and his colleague. So these were informal meetings. They rented a hall somewhere from somebody they knew so that it wouldn't be too widely known, and they played music and in today's terms maybe did some happenings or something like that. Things were read that you couldn't normally get to. And this Milan Kohout organized an event in August '83 in Holubín, which is near Planá near Mariánské Lázně, on the private property of an acquaintance. It was a former school, he lived there at the time. And it was supposed to be a kind of unofficial culture event. There was mainly music played from records, and there were to be other theatre performances. I was going to have some kind of theatrical sketch there, so I was to be involved in the program in some way. Well, I wasn't involved, because the State Security intervened, which at that time had already had the event under surveillance, of course, and which later made an affair out of it. Apparently the comrades had to show some activity, so this came in handy for them, because it was actually the biggest, in their terms anti-state, event that was to take place in Holubín. I'll cut it short. Some of us arrived there a day earlier to prepare the stage and so on. The next day, when the people were supposed to arrive - probably not from the whole country, but from western Bohemia, because it had been known there - the place was already surrounded by soldiers, by State Security members... They dispersed the event. They registered all of us, of course."

"At about four o'clock in the morning my mum woke me up [and] she was crying terribly. And I remember to this day that she dropped that sentence... I didn't know what was happening. A ten-year-old boy being woken up by his mum at four o'clock in the morning crying. And she said one sentence: 'We were attacked by the Russians.' Because the reports that Allied troops had entered Czechoslovakia, as they were officially called, were first broadcast sometime around midnight. And even before that, the radio had already warned that it was going to broadcast an important message. So they actually learned sometime during the night that it was like this. And it wasn't long after that that the tanks started rumbling around Pilsen. But I don't remember [that] because the very next day my parents picked us up. We already had a car at that time. Mind you, that was not such a common thing either. And they drove us back to Vrčeň, where we spent the rest of the holidays. And the other impression that I remember still today is that when we were arriving in Vrčeň, we drove through Nepomuk, because you can go through Nepomuk or you can take a kind of a side road through the monastery. Anyway, if you go down a little bit before Nepomuk, the Green Mountain appears in front of you. The Green Mountain Castle, we all know, the Black Barons [book], the Green Mountain Manuscript. And there, in the fields below Green Mountain, were three Russian tanks, their barrels raised, pointing at Green Mountain, because there was a military garrison on Green Mountain at that time."

"I actually read through those beginnings and how a child perceives that time. Because I used to go to the library at least once a week, I would bring back piles of books, and pretty soon I started to jump from that childhood reading, starting with fairy tales, and into things that came out then. So I knew quite early on, dare I say, at the age of ten, eleven, that the World War II had not been just the Soviet Union that had liberated us, as we were drilled into our heads in primary school. But I knew that there had been something called the Western Front, that the war had not ended on May 9, 1945, as we were also drilled into our heads in school, but a day earlier. That there had been a Western Front, that there had been a war in the Pacific, where the Americans and the Japanese had fought until August 1945, and so on and so forth. That there had been a resistance, not just the Communist resistance, that there had been our airmen in England who were idols to us, to the boys of those days. So for my generation, those idols were not only Old Shatterhand and Vinnetou. That's when those famous movies came out, now long ago movies for elderly, with Pierre Brice and Lex Barker. So it was a kind of initiation thing, let's say. Then the previously mentioned Jaroslav Foglar, and then the Western airmen. And because I lived in Pilsen, of course, at that time we knew and could talk again about the fact that Pilsen had not been liberated by the Soviet army, but by the Americans."