Petr Maišaidr

“The following days (after August 21, 1968) were entirely different. The first day was a day of fighting and resistance, but then it was completely different. Meaning that people mostly tried to argue and reason with those Soviet soldiers – explaining that there was no counterrevolution here, that they were unneeded here. Whole families were coming there. Mothers with babies in prams were also coming, and since at that time everyone learned Russian at school, they were able to speak with the soldiers. And all the soldiers claimed that it was not their fault, that they came here as part of a military exercise – most of them were unhappy because of that. But I also remember a case, it happened by that famous Soviet tank on Smíchov Square, and some mother with a baby pram and children said to them: ´Well, and if they ordered you…?´ The soldier explained that he would have rather been in our country as a tourist rather than a soldier, that he didn’t want to do us any harm. And the mother asked: ´Well, but if they gave you an order to shoot, would you shoot at us?´ And he replied right into her face. ´Yes, I would shoot.´ And she asked: ´And you would really shoot me, and my baby in this pram?´ He said: ´Da.´”

“When I was kicked out of Prague grammar school and went to Litvínov, I already knew Český Jiřetín, it is a remote village right at the border with Germany, there are beautiful forests there, and it’s a wilderness area. They made me go to Litvínov, but something good always comes from something bad, and right during the summer holiday I went to see the local gamekeeper, for whom I had twice worked with part-time before, he was a chairman of the local state committee, and he told me: ´No problem, just take whatever you want, doesn’t matter, the houses are empty, just pick whichever you like and it’ll be yours.´ Well, I chose one, and to this day I have this cottage from 1840, I keep going there to my summer house, the surroundings there are stunning, obviously the nature looks very different from the time when we went there for scout summer camp in 1969-70, at that time there were primeval spruce forests. They all vanished and withered away due to exhaust emissions. On the other side of the Ore Mountains range, the trees didn’t get dry, but they preventively cut them all down, which is a pity. The East Germans haven’t done it, their forests are untouched, and if we had not done cut them down, we would have had the same forests today as the Germans have. The windward slopes did get dry, it was necessary to cut them down. I’m now talking about spruce. Beech, oak, birch – the deciduous trees – were not affected so much. Thus I became an avid cottage owner, which takes much of my time, which I might have spent wandering around the country, camping, but I have been working on improving my cottage and this gave me an opportunity to try out various skills, which later came very handy during the scouting summer camps which we organized in 1969-70 in the woods around Český Jiřetín, where one of the participants was the famous ´Akéla´ Vláďa Kolář.”

“Since I already considered myself a renowned scout, I set out to the streets as a scout. I attached the scout symbol of fleur de lis with a Czech tricolor to my civilian clothing and I imagined that I was not only doing my civic duty, but the duty ensuing from my scout pledge as well. I wrapped a Czechoslovak flag around my body under my shirt as a symbol. But unfortunately it came loose when we tried to build a barricade from that tram, I lost it without noticing it. Then it occurred to me that a state flag was actually not only a symbol of state, but a symbol of freedom as well. And the scout oath says that a scout is ready to defend his homeland. I thus took a Czechoslovak flag from the propaganda centre which was in Balbínova or in the adjacent street, and during those eventful moments when people were dying on the Vinohradská Avenue in front of the Radio building, and especially in Balbínova, where many people were lying dead on the street, I immersed this flag in the blood of four people who had been shot in the passage, with the idea that this flag should become a lasting symbol for scouts, a lasting symbol on which they take their scout oath, because scouts take the oath, pledging on the state flag, on the fundamentals of scouting, meaning the Fundamentals by Antonín Benjamín Svojsík or Scouting for Boys by Baden-Powell, and on the Holy Bible, as a symbol of spiritual values. That was the reason why I immersed this flag in blood and since that time the scouts from my group, and later from the scout centre have been making their oath precisely on this state flag which had been immersed in the blood of those four people, who had died in front of the Radio building.”

“We arrived to the Communist Party Headquarters and the Hungarian units were already there. What I remember was that the Hungarians in armored vehicles – I’m not sure if there were only the Hungarians, or if Russian tanks were there – I am certain that Hungarian units were there. And a majority of these soldiers had thrown their submachine guns to the ground and they were crying like little children and they were desperately apologizing to us. Somebody was shot there in front of the Communist Headquarters. I was certainly not among the first ones when I came to the Communist Party Headquarters, because some guys were running around there, carrying a bloodied Czechoslovak flag and saying. ´They’ve shot our friend to death.´ Then they formed a cordon of these armored vehicles and tanks and so we moved to the Wenceslas Square. I will never forget that Soviet soldier who dropped his submachine gun on the Wenceslas Square, and tears were streaming down his face and he was embracing us and begging us for forgiveness. But he probably didn’t live to see our times. Wenceslas Square was not really taken over by tanks, tanks were positioned only around the National Museum. That’s where the shooting began, they were shooting at the Museum. But I was somewhere halfway down the Wenceslas Square when it started, and so I didn’t see it well. I only knew there was shooting up there and people were lying on the ground, because bullets were whizzing right by our ears.”