Alexandr Hrabálek

“Monday morning, I arrived at the faculty and I saw an enormous crowd of students in front of the building. They were running around the faculty, debated, put up posters which informed what had happened in Prague the evening before. Among them, the faculty secretary was scurrying and tearing the posters down – it was quite silly. We assembled in the lecture hall where we learned what had actually happened. We were outraged by the régime’s action against the students. We decried those actions. At that time, we still didn’t know about Martin Šmíd, taht he was not dead. They were looking for him and later he was found alive and fine. I still do not know what was the point – this story about the alleged death of Martin Šmíd. In Hradec, demonstrations started and the students took part. And it was a somewhat unpleasant situation because we, the young teachers, were in charge of study groups. I had the first or second year students to supervise, it was a group of girls. And the girls wanted to go to a demonstration on the 24th of November. The world went that the People’s Militia is ready, who want to suppress the demonstration harshly. We were stuck between a rock and a hard place – we were worried about our students but on the other hand, we knew that we cannot stop them from going. We know that it was the right thing to do, that we have to show the power of students in Hradec Králové. At the end, the only thing I did, I admonished them to please be careful and not to get manoeuvred into a situation when they could be attacked and treated badly. Luckily, the whole meeting ended just fine.”

„We were in the middle of Hungary, in a small town called Zirc, and to our great surprise, the local police divided the passing cars in two groups, Czechs and the others. The Czech cars were diverted to the yard of the local school and there, they informed us that our country is occupied, the border crossings cannot be passed and we have become guests of the Hungarian republic. We made a convoy of around five hundred cars and they directed us to a camp site in Györ where we were lodged. We spent there five days and I need to say that the Hungarians cared for us very well and many times, they reminded us how they understood us because they went through a similar situation twelwe years ago, with the difference that it ws much worse and bloodier. All the bridges across Danube were closed so we had to return home via Levice where we stayed overnight. Levice is a spa town known for Alexander Dubček having jumped into a swimming pool there, which was caught on that famous photograph.”