Ludmila Fišerová

"I went back then, it was in my third year, it was after America [concert 29-30 March 1974 at the Na Americe pub in Rudolfov near České Budějovice], I went with a classmate to see her off. We hitchhiked to Sušice, to my mother's region. We sat in Fialka, had a beer, and I said to Maruna: 'There sits our headmaster's wife.'" She said, "Does she know you?" I said, "Yeah, she knows my mom from the hat shop. I thought, maybe she won't tell him at school. Of course, the next day he came to class and we both had to go to the principal's office. So we knew what was going on. But what bothered me the most was I was afraid my dad was gonna beat me at home. He [high school principal Vlcek] started asking who was in our class at America. He took advantage of the situation, because he saw, I was almost crying in the principal's office, that we were scared, and he started asking who, he didn't know that I was there. He asked if I knew who from our class was at America. He wanted to get it out of us, I didn't say anything. Years later, when we had a reunion of the whole high school in Metropol, Maruna said, 'Come on, we're going to see Vlček, we're going to see the principal.' I said, 'You know what, tell him I'm not going to see him. The reason I'm not going to see him is because he took advantage of the situation and wanted us to tell on our classmates.' I didn't go to him."

"Everyone knew then that there would be this event. It was known. I went there on Friday. It was completely normal. Then there were terrible rumors about what was going on. Totally normal. It was just so crowded. There were too many people in the hall, it's not that big. I left at 10:00 on Friday because my parents didn't know I was there. So I went home at 10:00. The next day, on Saturday, we had already bought a ticket, so I didn't go there until sometime in the afternoon, or I don't know towards the evening, around four or five. We went up this hill in Vrať and suddenly we saw people running down, running away. We kept going. We were wondering what was going on. My classmate and I actually got in the middle of the crowd. I was there with a classmate from high school. I remember a cop running after me with a baton. Jirka got it, hit my classmate, and I yelled at him to leave me alone because I had surgery on my leg. I could feel, I still remember, the baton on my back. We ran down. They basically cancelled it before it started. I ran down and there were people running down the field on the side and on the other side. Then all of a sudden a bus came and picked us up completely outside the bus stop. It was completely packed and took us into town. We went with the girls I was there with, so we went to the Slunce and actually sat there all evening. There was a check in there too, and we said, 'We've been sitting here all evening. We don't know about any America, we weren't there.' There were antons and policemen driving around the square all the time. At the station they were beating people who were leaving."