Marie Charvátová

"When I was fifteen, that was on the twenty-first of August [1968], I remember it exactly, because every teenager sleeps until ten, eleven, so we were sleeping with my brother at home. At our place, the bus came to Čejkov, and my mother got off, carrying about three loaves of bread with her, because they already knew from the morning that the Russians had come. They had lived through the war, so the first thing was to get bread, we had potatoes at home, and they ran to the local shop to see if they could sell them a bag of sugar and a bag of flour, that's how it used to be, during the war. They were trying, that's how we felt. Then I was at grammar school, I know that when Jan Palach burned himself, I was in the first yeat at grammar school, that we participated in demonstrations."