"I'll tell you the number, don't take it at face value, but there were four hundred soldiers and ninety of us. And we used to march just like they did, we never had any relief. I remember the winter march for that twenty miles, that was from the 21st to the 22nd of December. That made us... Even the boys in the canteen, the cooks, they said, 'Girls, take bread, it's going to be marching today.' And we said, 'What would we take...' At ten o'clock in the evening after curfew they whistled, now we had to wait on the meeting place... it was awful cold, before all the officers got a ride from that... Because the whole regiment went, it wasn't just us. By then the ambulances were ready to pick us up. And we were such heroes that they didn't have to pick us up, we... Even though we had blisters, because we didn't have any socks, we had these foot wraps in the heavy boots, the today´s army boots, that's a luxury, but we had these boots with the studs underneath - we had to fit them there ourselves when it got loose. And then when we came back from the march, our feet were full of blisters because we had made our foot wraps wrong and it was pushing us... And rather than to go to the infirmary, yeah, we'd better pierce them, we'd let the water out, and then we'd cut it out with scissors, because we didn't want to go to the infirmary. But the boys, they [the ambulances] were successfully picking them up there. They, when they saw they could get a ride, they got a ride, but we were big heroes, sometimes too much."
"We used to have self-study, we had to study really hard. And... the planes, like the draughtwomen, so we learned how to draw planes. We had a map of Europe on these Plexiglas sheets first, it was as big as this living room here. But then it was in Prague. We only had part of it there. And now we had headphones, and they were broadcasting one of these as a practice thing, and we were... we had to draw it. But it was drawn like... The republic was divided into squares, for example, and it was drawn that number one was like this and backwards, yeah. There were women sitting in front of me in Prague, and then they were sending it to Lvov, to Warsaw, to Budapest. And I used to run there, I had a stool, a bench, because all of Europe was there, and now they were drawing the planes, yeah. They were drawing what you heard, what was going on in there, in those headphones. Well, and then they... they continued to broadcast in Russian to Lvov, and as I said, to Warsaw and to Budapest."
"One time it happened, I remember, it was General Lomský, the Minister of Defence. But that was still in Karlín. And there, when he was on the border, there used to be these sight posts and all these stones and wherever it was, wherever they were guiding it, before it actually got to us, so that we could... So there just suddenly appeared a plane, yeah, and it landed in Plzeň and it had the insignia of not the Czech, Czechoslovak army, but... So it was such a big deal then... It flew to us and our soldiers didn't find out until it was in Pilsen." - "That was a mess." - "Well, it was such a mess that I'll remember it for the rest of my life, when that General Lomský came, he was such a short, fat guy. He came in there shouting. It was Lieutenant Colonel Tučková who served with us then as the commander of that shift. She was a woman in her place. And he roared there, he shouted at the whole leadership that was there. We just stood there behind the boards, we didn't even breathe, because... And in that... and in the next room, he was yelling so much that he was going to hang the operators, I remember him yelling, that he was going to hang the operators by their balls in the draught."
"Well, so I ran to the barracks, and now there were these soldiers at the barracks. And there were coincidentally... They were... Soviets, but they were from there somewhere like... They were kind of like those Mongolians, yeah, like Mongols. Now, these tarpaulins, none of these... tarpaulins, dirty, sleepless... Well, can you be mad at them if these guys didn't know where they were? They didn't even know where they were. I... I mean, I don't think they knew where they were. Well, we had a roll call, the ones that were there. Well, there were some among us that said we wouldn't give them a drop of water. But, I mean, I think that... I took it from the point of view that I had two little kids already, so I was like, 'Jesus, those guys don't even know where they are, well.'"
"After that we served in the barracks at the tank in Smíchov, we used to go... Well, actually, today we can say that, because President Havel also said that. We actually served... There was this government... the government shelter, actually. That's when we, when we went into the barracks there, we had to put white coats on our uniforms. And when we were walking across that courtyard, if anybody would look where we were going, we'd say that here was a dairy, we're working in a dairy."
"They left because of the year 68. They just didn't accept it. The other ones, you could say, like it or not like it today, nobody protested much about it, giving up uniforms or ripping away the epaulettes, it did not happen there. But I know from what I remember, there were five officers who just left, like, right in the early days, they didn't put up with it."
Eliška Bočková, née Pikalová, was born on 23 September 1942 in Zlín. Immediately after her birth, she struggled with health problems and doctors presented her as a model example of a successfully cured newborn. She grew up with her parents and siblings in the so-called Baťa houses in Zlín and remembers hiding from air raids in her early childhood. Although she had dreamed of studying medicine all her life, she eventually decided on a career in the army. At the age of seventeen, she joined the army, where she studied at the air force ground specialist school in a platoon of flight track draughtswomen. After two years, she entered the service with the rank of sergeant. At the army she met her husband, who also signed a commitment to the Czechoslovak People‘s Army. They settled in southern Bohemia. She remembers the occupation in August 1968 from her position as a member of the army. Her husband had been a member of the Communist Party since his youth, but lost his party membership during the 1970 normalization background checks. Eliška Bočková never joined the Communist Party. It did not affect her career, but the family had a problem with her daughter‘s admission to the grammar school for cadre reasons. In the army, the witness reached the rank of major. She was widowed in 1991 and retired in 1997.
Markéta Čechová, Velen Kalina, Petra Kobylková, Karolína Kostincová, Joan Alexandr Ivanov Nedelchev
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