Arnošt Odehnal

"The year 1968 - in fact, the holidays were over and I was entering an industrial school in Brno. I was studying geodesy, and even when I entered the school, I could see that this period of occupation was manifesting itself there. You could clearly see and feel it among the teachers, because some of them were completely open, they condemned the occupation and were not afraid to speak openly in front of us. The others were such job-oriented people who only had their profession and didn't talk about politics, didn't want to talk about politics. I remember Professor Marková, she was a Russian teacher who made no secret of her views that the occupation was unjustified, unnecessary. Instead of teaching, she read to us from her letters that she wrote directly to the Soviet Union, where she addressed her friends or relatives, even various organisations that she had been given contacts to, and where she explained to them that the occupation was very unfortunate, that it should not have happened at all, that it would break all the ties that our citizens and the Soviet people had here, because that had been supported a lot up to that time, and they were sometimes even friendly relations, that these would be broken permanently. She also read to us the answers that she was getting from her acquaintances, how they were being informed by the media about why the occupation took place, that it was absolutely necessary, that there was a counter-revolution in our country and that there was no other way."

"The headmaster instead of teaching us and lecturing on the subject, he started asking us if any of us were interested in politics, if our parents talked about it with us at home, if we perceived what was happening in society and what the future would be like. None of my classmates had the courage to come forward and say anything about it. Either they were afraid, or maybe they didn't know, maybe they didn't care. But anyway, I gathered the courage and what I knew about political events I tried to explain and tell him in some way. And I said that there was some kind of Prague Spring, that there was an effort to change the hard Stalinist or Brezhnevist politics and actually to make socialism with a human face here. That was a kind of slogan that was also heard in the media at that time. And after I told him that, we basically engaged in a debate, and the Director clarified, explained everything that I hadn't had time to say or hadn't fully understood. And I know that at that time I felt that finally there was a time when even what I hear at home is true and I can say it in public and even in school."