ak. soch. Luděk Pavézka

"I spent August 21, 1968 sleeping in the open air near Hluboká nad Vltavou. One sleeps very lightly in the open air. We realized that something was happening only when we heard a noise, but we didn’t know what was going on. In the morning we woke up, or more like we were woken up by the sun. We saw that there was a long queue of cars at the gas station, so we thought we would ask someone to take us to Prague. Nobody wanted to talk to us, and besides we were dressed like soldiers, like hikers. We arrived at the train station in Hluboká nad Vltavou and decided to eat something at the buffet. We asked if there was anything going to Prague, we were absolutely clueless, we had no radio, we didn’t have anything. The waitress brought us goulash with about eight slices of dumpling. We told her we wouldn’t even be able to finish it. But she said, 'If you're going to Prague, you have to eat well.’ We should have understood then what was going on, but we only understood it when we got off the train at a small station somewhere in Prague. There were already tanks there. Somehow we still got to the center of Prague to the broadcasting company. But there was nothing but mess, overturned cars, barricades and fallen linden trees... I only understood it when I got home."

"My grandfather was a legionary in Russia. He used to tell us stories, I remember that as a little boy I admired him. He had a huge scar on his right arm and he told us that he had to send a bullet through his arm in order to get captured, which was very interesting to us as children. He got in. With my grandfather, it was a little bit problematic, we never knew what he was apprenticed as, because he could do everything. He even wrote some memoirs about how he got from Vladivostok back to Czechoslovakia on a boat. however, I never found that memoir."

"And how was it? Well, first of all, we were an exception in our society in a way. I mean socialist society. And those exceptions always had problems. Because everybody went to work and according to those people who went to work, we didn't go anywhere because we were mostly at home. And so we had to get a job, do something and sell it. And that was done through the Czech Fine Arts Fund organization, which was called Dílo, and they practically covered us."

"The first year after August 21, they assigned us as non-commissioned officers or... Because I only had one ensign as a lance corporal... They assigned us to a police patrol, so the police patrol was to be accompanied by two soldiers. And we used to go around Pilsen and guard the Bory prison and stuff, because of course people were opposing it. So it was quite unpleasant. If it was cold at night, we would go into a pub to warm up, and these guys with their beers would start asking us, 'Would you shoot at us?' Or... It was very unpleasant, because we knew practically nothing about what was going on. We didn't have radios or anything like that. We weren't allowed to watch television at all. So you were kind of scared of everything."