Augustin Konečný

"We worked in the village of Russko-Vysotskoye, not far from present-day St Petersburg, about 40 kilometres away. We familiarised ourselves with the environment and then travelled all over that vast country. I have to say, if I think of Jan Palach, he was a very resilient guy and he seemed a bit of a brooding guy, or so I think in my memories. But he also showed great organisational skills. We went to Russia or the Soviet Union a few days after the publication of the Two Thousand Words Manifesto, after which the aggressive rhetoric of the Warsaw Pact members against Czechoslovakia peaked. So, in this situation, at the end of June, beginning of July [1968], I don't remember exactly, we left via Warsaw, and because we were late on the express train from Prague, we missed the express train that was supposed to go to Grodno, now in Belarus. And he, Jan, as the leader of the group - there were no cell phones, if he wanted to make a phone call he would have to go to the post office to beg - rearranged that they gave us the tickets for the replacement train. We spent the whole night at the station in Warsaw. And then, when we crossed the border, he arranged it again. There was a lot of chaos there, friendly countries, you realised that - they stamped the shoes of those Poles who were going to Russia with some numbers, so that they would come back with it. So he made sure that they took us on some express train, which took us all the way to Leningrad. Well, we stayed there a lot, they showed us all sorts of things, and we worked in a village that was about 40 kilometers from that Leningrad. He was the leader of the group, and after about a month of work - we were building a poultry farm there - so we went on a trip all over that territory. We went to Moscow, we went there for about three days, then to Georgia to Tbilisi, I think [we went] there for three [days] as well, then to Batumi, that's on the Black Sea coast, for about two [days], then by boat via Yalta, there was a stop to Odessa and via Lvov, there we saw the wagons where the tanks or armoured personnel carriers were loaded. A few days before 21 August, about four days before, we were returning home. I, as a Moravian, got off the Moscow-Prague express in Olomouc, and that was the last time I saw Palach."

"The student magazine Ekonom was subject to censorship, but that censorship was already toothless. I know that we had a fascicle of things that we were not allowed to write about. For example, what stuck with me: the fire safety system of Prague Castle [laughs]. I still remember that. It was a list of all sorts of things, but that didn't concern us, we were writing about politics. Now [in February 2023] the inauguration of the new president is being prepared, and I remember that when President Ludvík Svoboda was inaugurated, we were in the courtyard of Prague Castle to see it. Our group was more on the more left-wing spectrum of those views. It was definitely conventional to me, that socialism with a human face, as they used to say, because it was all in full bloom after the grey before. Figuratively and physically, and that was in the spring of sixty-eight."

"I perceived that time not only through discussions, but also by reading and listening to the radio. In our country, the Czechoslovak radio was always on, switched to Free Europe. I perceived it very normally, I would say. And in 1956, when I was eight years old, I could distinguish very well that the Czechoslovak radio was reporting that the counter-revolution had been suppressed on the basis of the demand of the Hungarian Republic - perhaps already a people's republic then. That was reported by Czechoslovak radio. And on Free Europe, I say this as an illustration, it was in the form that Soviet tanks had shot the hopes of the Hungarian nation. So I perceived it well, and I think I knew it."