"So we heard that there had been some kind of massacre in Prague, so we came back and I announced on Monday, I was doing my internship at the time, so at the economic school in Resslová, someone is applying from us now, I just announced that I feel more like a student than a teacher and that I'm joining the student strike. I walked home to my parents. There I took my sleeping bag, I am a little ashamed of it, I emptied their fridge and went to the faculty, where I stayed for the next ten days without leaving it, or rather without going anywhere else. My parents didn't know about me for those ten days, no phones, no cell phones, no nothing like that. There were about, I don't know, five landlines for the whole Faculty of Arts, and it was forbidden to make private phone calls there, because we needed to coordinate differently with the students from DAMU (Academy of Performing Arts in Prague), with the students from Czech Technical University, not with the law students. They didn't join until very late, they were behind, they were chicken-hearted - and the same with the School of Ecomics. Those were the ideological faculties, and they were very afraid that it might not end up well and they might be expelled."
"It was ugly on Thursday, we arrived there on Thursday and they had these sprinkler trucks parked in the side streets with thw water cannons that they use now in Myanmar, in Burma. They had this thing, it really looks like a snow plough, but it's a plough share against people. It works really like moving a mass of people to get it somewhere. Yeah, it's big too, it's the size of, I don't know, a truck and it really looks like a plough share. Police vans, it was like those Avia trucks, buses, lots of police cars. Parachute regiment, I mean, they had white helmets, they were visible from a distance. I have to say it took me a long time, a really long time, it made my stomach hurt to see the white helmets, it made my stomach hurt because I was really scared of them."
"I know I went for a walk with my dad and it was very hot. Kraslice was, the streets were completely empty, except that the curbs from the pavements were turned upside down everywhere by the tanks, because it wasn't only the tanks from the former Soviet Union that came to Prague, but it was a total of five occupation armies and of course the East German army, so they came through our town. We were on the route. And as they were driving along, they tore out all the curbs from all the pavements on the route, and I remember, not so much the curbs, but the horror, the sense of dread that filled me, what a monster it must have been that tore out all those pavements."
Petra Bernatová was born on 2 December 1965 in Prague. From 1967 to 1974, the family lived in Kraslice in the Ore Mountains, where they also experienced the occupation by Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968. In the 1980s Petra was accepted to study Czech and French at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. During her studies, she considered emigrating. In 1989, she attended demonstrations during the so-called Palach Week, and later, in November, she participated in the occupation student strike. Until 1994 she worked at the newspaper Český deník. Then, after maternity leave, she joined the education sector, where she has worked ever since (2021).
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