František Hromada

"The director [of the theatre] had to have some cover. During the time Grossmann was there, he had cover from several, I would say, more credible directors and actors who were in the party. He said to me: 'You want Martin Urban as dramaturge, so try harder.' There was nobody. There were certain people who were [in the Communist Party], but they were not a good backing. Even one comrade actress was, as director Vlk said at the time, untrustworthy. They pressured me so much, saying I was the only one pure enough to join the party. I said, "Fine, I'll do it, but I’m not sure they’ll accept me because my record isn’t spotless—they won’t gain much favor from me." Well, in the end, [Director] Vlk was a good negotiator, and he managed to push it through—so I didn’t become a member but rather a candidate. That’s the thing. I got this candidate’s card, which I, of course, returned with relief when, in November 1989, those comrades started shouting at me: "To the wall!" So I finally had a reason to put it aside. It was, more or less, just a service. There’s no other way to put it—a service.

"There was a queue there, there was a signing sheet and all the employees of the Pilsen theatre followed each other. Well, I walked past, looked at it and went in. Well, of course, someone pointed it out, they found that my signature was missing, so they hit me and I said I had no reason to sign it, so I stormed out. I was terminated by the end of the year."

"So, for the record, I was visited by the Turba family, Mr Turba, who owned the pub. The old gentleman, I welcomed him, I was glad to see him. And he was glad it didn't fall down too. That it stayed. And so he was describing to me where everything was. And I said to him, 'You must be sorry, right? How do you feel?' And he said, 'No, I'm not sorry. I'm sorry that the houses fell, but I'm not sorry that they evicted us.' And I said, 'What are you telling me?' And he said, 'Well, you know, there was a death march. The dredgers broke it up and the prisoners scattered across the meadows. And a local mayor named Watzka, who was a Nazi, made us all... We had to get in as citizens and everybody had to take a pitchfork or an axe or whatever they had to beat the prisoners up if they were wounded. And he said, 'You know, I didn't hit anybody, but I went. I had the axe in my hand. I knew I wasn't going to use it, but I was afraid not to pick it up, and all the way there I was thinking, 'Oh my God, you're not going to forgive us for this.'"

"My dad drove to the office regularly and got off at the bus stop. He didn't go to the station, he went to the bus stop. There was a kiosk there, he bought a newspaper there and went to a nearby pub where he had a beer and went to work. And that was fatal for him. Because in that forgotten kiosk, they had forgotten a confiscated edition of Dikobraz, which had a cartoon of Gottwald and the government. And he brought it to the pub, and the publican came in, brought him a beer: 'Let me see that.' So he looked at it and gave it to the others to circulate. And there was a guy called Brettschneider and they took the whole pub out. And the publican and dad got... They were imprisoned for distributing anti-state press. And dad got... When he ran... First he was in custody for about six months. Then he got three years."

"All of a sudden, at night, a call came in and we were driving out. We thought it was some kind of drill alarm. And we were still joking, because the radio chief was the first one hurt, because the car in the dark...because we were going touch and go...the car went off the road and he headed out the decal in the cab and they took him away. So we said we had the first casualty. But then we just kept going and we always drove touch and go at night and during the day we were hidden in the woods. And we still had to be... And we rode like that for about three days, getting closer to the border. I was a radio operator, Dusan Robert Parizek, my later colleague and friend, was a searcher. That is, he wrote down the flights, the paths of the planes on a kind of transparent panel, and I reported the coordinates. And I had to pull it all out of Morse code. So it happened that towards the end, in the daytime, when we must have been hidden in that forest, when I went out to rest for a while, I heard the birds singing Morse code. And the commanders were a bit like that... And we were getting closer and closer to the border, and these commanders started whispering that there was a war on and that we had to conquer... that we had to get to the Rhine. We thought it was a joke, but then later when I found out what it really was, it was true. We were predestined, the first sequence was to conquer further than the Rhine, we were to conquer Munich and the Rhine with the Russians coming after us. And that it was going to be atomic, so we had to reckon with casualties. That's literally it. I'll tell you, at first it was conjecture, then I read in these historical treatises that it was true."