Mirosław Jasiński

"Not only Wroclaw remains in memory, but Wroclaw remembers the Czechs. I am talking about my dear friend Petruška Šustrová. Recently there was her funeral, I was there and there were two presidential wreaths - the wreath of the President of the Republic of Poland and the wreath of the President of Wroclaw. There were others, of course, there were many others, I want to say that Wroclaw does not forget. Just as the marines do not leave the wounded behind, so Wroclaw does not forget exceptional personalities, and Petruška Šustrová was such a person. I have to say that she, with Honza Ruml, and especially with Janek [Langosz], as deputy of the Ministry of the Interior, the whole three from the Ministry thwarted in effect the strategic intention of the Russians to stay in Poland with their army. I am referring to the Council of National Defence, which Havel convened at that time in February '91, and which rejected, let's say, the Germans' corrupt offer of eight million marks to Czech Railways for letting the Russians through Czechoslovakia. That would have meant, and we knew it, that we would have had them to this day and our country would have looked different."

"It has to be said that, especially in the second and third meetings, it was a very long march to those meetings. We walked for three hours in the mountains and it was not easy because they were not exactly young people. That meeting, which the couriers also said that the two sides met, it was already uplifting in spirit given the circumstances - if there was going to be a police raid. On the second and third occasions it didn't happen; on the first one, because of the border guard, there was a raid, and part of it safely went down, and the other part, which I was in, because Jacek Kuroń persuaded us to buy proper shepherd's cheese from the shepherds who were herding sheep there. It lasted so long that the one car that was waiting for us at the bottom drove off quietly, and in the other one we were chased. And that's when I realized that the Kladsko basin could be a trap, which was confirmed when we were transporting Devátý, because there were only two roads."