Ivo Krejčí

"A report went through the village that an army car, fully loaded with weapons, was standing above the village at a crossroads, near the Red Column, it was said. Of course all the male population, specially the young ones, ran there. This was a short distance from our house, through a small wood across a cornfield. I, as a non-athlete, was the last one to run. My brother was already there in the front row. I was the last one to make it to the top of the slope. I looked, and in front of me was a field of spring wheat, a big field, light green. And there was this mass of men taking apart guns, which unfortunately were without ammunition, so ineffective. At that moment General Schellner's army was coming from Cologne, as it was later found out, which was going to help the Prague garrison, which was in distress, needed help. So it was a so-called hasty march, a motorised army. And there, when they saw the civilian population dismantling the guns, they of course detached one company, set up machine guns and mowed down the whole field as they ran home with their rifles." - "How many people did they kill there?" - "Thirty-six. There's a monument with names on it. That was downright execution. Because it was a flat area. The ones that escaped, they were very few. Those who were able to run so fast. My brother was among them."

"And I remember a situation when I walked from the conservatory through Kaprova Street across Old Town Square to Celetná and Hybernské nádraží. It was the procession of students to the Castle, where they wanted to demonstrate and convince Beneš not to sign the abdication of the ministers. There was that critical moment when Benes failed to sign the abdication. And I remember that parade. There was a parade of committed students - they were mostly university students, whereas the conservatory was something between a university and a high school. The graduation of the conservatory was and was not equated to a high school diploma. It was kind of an in-between state where it was just skating from one to the other. And there went this parade of these really engaged students who already knew what was going on. And I was walking in the other direction to the station with these two cases, violin and viola, and somehow it was actually going out of my way because I had other things on my mind to some extent. It didn't affect me as directly as the students. They already had a little bit higher level of knowledge, the information was of a different nature than mine."