Ing. Pavel Gross

"We had the support of both Prague divers and the Oceanographic Institute. The whole endeavour got quite generous. I eventually spent three days underwater. They brought me food in jars, sometimes the water got into it, so it got saltier, and I lived there like one lives in a camping site. I would go to the cabin to sleep. I couldn't surface; that would be dangerous as I was too saturated with inert gases, and I would go for walks on the seabed three times a day. After three days, I surfaced and there was a huge buzz. The press wrote a Czech was spending three days underwater, so there was big publicity also at home in Bohemia. Then I was preparing the second project, Xenie 2. Unfortunately there was a hitch with the support from the Yugoslav side, so it wasn't finished as we had envisioned. I couldn't be there for three days because didn't have the decompression chamber that they had promised to provide to us in case of an accident, so I only spent four or five hours in the cabin, trying out the technical functions, but there was no long-term stay. Then the invasion came, so there were no other things."

"Then the end of the war came, the Americans came, and it was like the Martians landed. The Americans were equipped with everything, overflowing with supplies. They supplied us with coffee, the children with chewing gum, various sodas... we had plenty of Nescafe. When they arrived, I saw women running out of the houses and bringing them cakes. They had never seen that; they had only eaten the war stuff during the war and suddenly they got cakes! I climbed on a tank and they gave me a ride in a tank. I always say, as a joke, that I liberated Plzeň by tank."