Ing. Ivo Brůžek

"What I perceived terribly at that time was the Olympics in Mexico in the year sixty-eight. And that again - the whole nation was living it. Of course, my dad and I loved sports, all that information, it was just like daily bread for us. That's basically what we talked about the most. And then the achievements of Čáslavská and all our people in Mexico. And the acceptance of Czechoslovakia by the world public at that time, I don't mean politically, but the admiration of those people for the fact that we managed to... or were surviving the invasion of the Russians. So that had a strong effect on us, too. Except that the thing that affected us the most was that... it seemed to me that those people, even though the Russians were there, they seemed to know that it would pass. They were very enthusiastic. Or disappointed. That was the emotion, of course. But those people were very much like on the same wave in those emotions."

"My childhood was over, so to speak. I was eleven years old and I still remember the day I was at that Ouklid, I'm sorry, Úklid it was called, the school, because they had a beautiful garden. There's just one car a day going there. Or they used to go at that time. The bus didn't even go there. And I was in the garden and I had my wooden machine gun, I mean, machine gun or pistol. I was really going after those cars as an 11-year-old going 'Ta ta ta ta!'-and there were somehow an awful lot of cars going that day. So I'd go out in the morning to shoot my daily routine, I pretended to shoot at cars, rabbits and chickens which I went around. And now I came into the room, there was a common kitchen, there was like a little TV in there back then, and I know everybody was crying. Suddenly just crying, my grandmother, the sisters, the aunts, my mum was there."