Jindřich Eliáš

"And there we monitored Soviet trucks and tanks driving by. When we saw a downright Brno man who was communicating, so to speak, in a friendly way with the Russian soldiers, we ran to the police and said, 'Watch out, there's an informant.' And so, of course, we ensured we were on the right side of the barricade. We subsequently felt it to be a big fraud on all of us who thought that this development would go a little more towards freedom in our Czechoslovak Republic after all. When the screws began to be tightened, we were clearly against it. Understandably, as more censorship began to operate again, which had ceased with the Prague Spring - we bought Literary Papers, read, and devoured works of Patočka and all the other writers. But suddenly it stopped, then Jan Palach, then Gustáv Husák, and it was over, the joy was over."

"I was wearing a black bell-bottom trousers and a black T-shirt, and someone at Medvídek's had pinned a tricolour on me, and then I entered Freedom Square. We didn't know that there were photographers in the police building and they took pictures of all of us. I was still walking around the city afterwards and I came across armed people's militiamen, to whom I made a speech to let me go to Zelný rynk. They refused, and I started talking about how we were in a free state, or so it is declared. These comrades remembered me well, and as they saw the photos from the square afterwards, they testified, they went to the Palace of Justice to testify against me. Suddenly, I was even the leader of a combative group. One said that at 5.30 pm under the lamp he recognized me well. My defense attorney at the time could only manage a single retort because it was not the fashion then to confront these comrades about whether the lamps were already lit in Brno at 5:30 pm in August."