Professor, MUDr. Lidka Lisá , DrSc.

"So that I wouldn't have to carry a pile of books home from the library, I used to spend the night at the Ke Karlovu clinic and study there. Suddenly someone starts knocking on the door of my room at night. I open it, and it is a nurse from the ward. I tell her, ‘I'm not on duty.’ And she says, ‘We are being occupied. The mothers of the patients have a radio here. The Russians invaded us.’ And there was a dead-end street Sokolská, where the tram number 6 had its terminus. I went out in front of the clinic, and Sokolská Street was full of tanks. The tanks could not go any further or back up. Then the director came there in the morning and another colleague from a different clinic who studied in the Soviet Union, so she spoke Russian very well. She kept calling out to them, 'Tovarišči, dětskaja bolnica, dětskaja bolnica!’ [Comrades, children's hospital, children's hospital! – trans.], and they couldn't do anything. Then I stayed at the clinic for about four days because no one came there. Both the patients and the doctors were afraid to travel across Prague."

“When I was studying grammar school after the year 1948–I was about fifteen years old–he came to me because he worked there in the party organization and said, ’Look, we're going to have a float at the May Day celebration. We have to make a banner for it.’ I remember that to this day. ‘You go to that grammar school, you can write well, so paint a banner for us and write–’ which really upset me at the time ‘–write that we will make twelve tons of grain extra.’ Well, it was a JZD [Unified agricultural cooperative – trans.] banner. I told him, 'OK, I'll write it.’ And then he says, ‘You know what? Don’t write that; write fifteen tons.’ I thought to myself, twelve tons or fifteen tons, that's a big difference. In the end, it didn’t happen at all. The gentleman realized it would be strange for such a small village to supply such a large ration. So we didn't write anything.”