Jindřich Malý

"At three o'clock in the morning, on 21 August, I heard a terrible noise outside. I went down to the kitchen and there were my parents and a man sitting by the radio listening. And there we heard what we all know: 'Czech Radio is calling, we've been occupied by the Allied troops,' and Russian tanks were driving past our house. We lived on this right-hand bend, and it was a terrible noise, because the tank always came into the bend and had to turn around with the tracks. I can still hear the sound. It was convoys of tanks that were passing by. Fortunately, what happened in Karlovy Vary was that the officer in charge of that Russian army was in Karlovy Vary several times for medical treatment, so he didn't allow those tanks to enter the spa district. They occupied Karlovy Vary all around, but the Russian tanks did not enter the spa district, which supposedly prevented the springs all around from collapsing, so that saved an awful lot. However, there was a bridge a short distance away where a Russian tank fell through, this happened in Karlovy Vary-Dvory. And we used to go and watch it because it was about two kilometres from us. The tank just fell in, and then they were pulling it out of that sunken bridge. Another situation in Karlovy Vary, two convoys went to the Cheb bridge and they drove opposite each other, and they thought they were enemies so started shooting at each other. So these are my memories of occupation."

"It was Saturday morning, I was in Munich and I thought I would go and buy something to eat. So I went to the city centre and there were these department stores. For us of course, it was something unbelievable – the amount of goods everywhere. I went to the food section. And there were two beautifully dressed ladies and they were speaking Czech. And I said, 'Hello, sorry to disturb you, I just emigrated and I don't know what to do.' And one of them replied, 'Maybe I can help you, there's an organization called the American fund for Czechoslovak refugees that helps emigrants.' And she gave me a phone number and address. Then I slept in the park for two days, it was summer, so I slept on a park bench, and on Monday morning I visited the organization."

"They took my papers. He left and came back with my passport and the papers and said, 'Get off the train. It's not in the interest of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic for you to leave the country.' So we got off the train. The train went on and we were standing on the Slovak-Hungarian border wondering what was going to happen next. We sat until the morning, from about midnight to the morning, in that waiting room at that police station that was at that railway station. In the morning, an official came. And I handled the situation really well because my father was working as a journalist in an army magazine. So I went to talk to this official - and I didn't even know the ranks, but I went to see him, he was a men in his sixties at the time, older than I am today, because he was white-haired. He was sitting there and I walked in and I said, `Hello, comrade captain. There must have been some mistake, my father works for the army. This is some kind of a misunderstanding.' And the men was nice, he was an older gentleman. He offered me coffee, and we talked."

"So I took the entrance exams to the secondary school of economics, distance learning, at Vinohradská třída. I passed the exams there and started studying in September. I was twenty-one years old then. September started, I went to my first class and the first class was a Russian class. And the teacher said in Russian: ' Zdravstvujtě, tovarišči' (Hello, comrades). And she started speaking to us in Russian right away. It made me feel sick and I said to myself, 'No, I'm not doing this anymore'. And I got up and I said, 'Do svidanija, tovarišči' (Goodbye, comrades) And I left the class and the school. And I knew it was the last straw, I knew I had to leave, I didn't want to be here anymore, I felt strongly about it. I'm an emotional person and that was a strong emotion for me. I wanted to complete my education, to be educated like my friends, so I enrolled the school and instead of teaching me maths or physics, they were talking to me in Russian. I had enough!"