Miroslav Lapiš

“I love the airplanes very much, and back then we came from Liptovský Mikuláš, at the time we were still together with the Slovaks, there came a politruk and offered us at a military air school and I was very excited because I said, ´Then I will go.´And then MiG-15 started again, those were the first jet planes from Russia. And I just signed in, got this application to fill out at home, my father should have signed it, and within a week they would have come back to recruit us. So I signed up, a colleague also signed up, who lived about a hundred and fifty yards from me, and I showed it to my dad and he said, ´Oh, no, I will not let you go up there, you go down the mine, we get coal, we'll have the heat and up there it's really dangerous!´ Well, it was dangerous down there, of course.”

“And when we were approaching Ostrava, around five kilometres from the city, suddenly there was an army troop, the place was called Hradečník, and the troop was Czech, but locked up and all of a sudden there were tanks coming out with Mongolians in them. Well I said Mongolians, as they were all skew-eyed, I really do not know, where they were from, And they did not know themselves, where they were coming and where they got to. And they drove towards us with the machine guns pointing at us. We marched in four lines and I suspected it was getting rough, so I was trying to get to the side trench, although I was supposed to walk in the middle. But of course the line changed as everyone wanted to be at the side. They drove along with us for about two kilometres still aiming at us and the boys were shouting some kind of wrong passwords. We had our flags only halfway up and various signs and they still did not understand at all and they did not speak a work in Czech. It lasted for about twenty minutes, and suddenly they got an order from their leaders and they turned left and let us go on. So we got to Ostrava in front of the town hall and made a petition. Someone read it and all the miners from the Ostrava-Karviná region gathered there. There were indeed thousands of miners there.”