Professor Ing. Milan Kejzlar CSc.

“For example the liberation of May 6th 1945 was... Well, many tragedies occurred at that time. For example, my father and me, we went to see how it looked like in the shop and we just unveiled some curtain and we saw this young Soviet soldier with a machine-gun standing in front of our shop who just fell down suddenly and showed no signs of life. Later we found out that on the opposing side – the square was maybe eighty meters wide – there was a sniper hidden in an attic who would just select the man and put him down. So that was quite a sad thing to see. This young man lost his life during the last day of the war, or last but one to be precise. And there had been more stories like this.

“And most of all after the Heydrich assassination. The situation escalated so much that we witnessed several raids by the German authorities. They were plainclothes but they searched our schoolbags and so on. That was quite unexpected, I would say, as we had never experienced anything like this. And at that time, it just happened. And there was this one more event after that, also quite an interesting one, as we had been summoned to an office at school where those two men in lab-coats measured our cranium. They had this movable ruler of sorts. And they would record the data. They were particularly interested whether we had blond hair, if we had blue eyes, well, whether we could have been classified as Aryans. I remember one girl from our class passing those tests. The rest of us ended up, I would say, as the unpopular Slavs.”

“There was this very sad moment, sad indeed, as after the annexation of Sudetenland, after Munich and the annexation of Sudetenland, I saw this woman in Valašské Meziříčí, a mother who carried one baby in her arms and the other one on her back in this backpack. She wept as she went, as she had to flee the borderlands, maybe she was from Nový Jičín or someplace nearby, as even Nový Jičín had been annexed. And the lady just got to our territory but she had no money, nothing, just those two little babies. So those were moments I found extremely difficult. And it wasn't just me after all.”

“After that, there was this complicated situation, I would say, to quote a classic: 'What to do with it?' What to do with Marxism-Leninism teachers? It was a bloated department, whole institute at the university. What to do with those people? And they demanded their salaries of course, as they were still employed by that department of theirs. And no one needed them. So it was quite a complicated situation, and of course rector had to deal with that later, the ministry and so on, as a whole new nationwide policy was needed for those people who were in fact no longer of any use.”