PaedDr. Vlastimila Pešková

"It was before the eighties, anyway. I got a call from Director Pauch saying that the criminal police had come to pick me up, but I wasn't present, and that they were coming for me the next day to change my mind about why I was being summoned. So I changed my mind, and I thought right away that it was because of Milena Miřičková, because I knew that they had searched Milena's apartment - a completely ransacked apartment. The next day, at noon, I got a call from the director saying that I should come, that they had come for me. So they took me. In Strakonice, behind the police building, there's a kind of prison. It's individual cells, an annex, barred doors, barred windows. So there were already two of them waiting for me, facing each other, I was sitting between them, it was uncomfortable, really. They opened a big notebook, a book almost ten centimetres thick, and from that they read out to me what I was like, what somebody had said to me and so on. And the interesting thing is that they knew that I had a pen friend in Wimbledon, and I said, 'Yes, I had a pen friend, we corresponded, she was supposed to come ten years after the Russian invasion, but she didn't come because she was afraid, and then this investigation came about.' And they presented me with a photograph of a young woman, curly-haired, dark, and they asked who she was. And I said, 'I don't know, I've never seen her.' And they said, 'Don't tell us such tales, you've been corresponding with her for years.' And I said, 'Well, I'm glad you're showing me her, Denise Leged from Wimbledon, because she never sent me a photo and now I see she sent me a photo and you have it.' I sent her a photo of myself, but her photo never arrived, I didn't know what she looked like. I said, 'I don't know, I haven't seen her, I've corresponded with her, but I haven't seen a photo.'"

"So that was the forty-fifth year, which then ended with a joint parade of the American and Russian armies. Because in Blatná there was not only the American army, but also the Russian army, the Soviet Red Army, but because the demarcation line went around Blatná, the Americans were in the town and the Russians were just outside the town, today it's part of the town, on Malý vrch, where they had a broken camp. They had a fireplace there, tents, they sang, they played the garmos, it was also something wonderful. Well, it's hard for me to talk about it, because it's still alive... The American army and the Russian army or the Red army, they were totally different people. The Russians were not well dressed, they were dirty, they were dirty. The Americans looked absolutely nice, beautifully dressed, clean, smiling. In front of the school where they lived there are still three little parks with plants and trees, where they used to relax, box, play rugby, and even gave one of their boxing gloves to our family when they left. And the cards that they played with and played with us, they also left in the family. They are still in our family to this day. But the difference between the Red Army and the American Army was very noticeable, and when there was a parade of the two armies on the main street of Blatná, my parents and I were at that parade. I, as a child with a flower in my hand - my dad was holding me so I could see better - watched the whole parade and I still remember it. When the Americans marched, somebody went, excited that something bad was over. When the Russians went, one Russian soldier got separated and came up to me, and he unwrapped a metal from his breast pocket, which was wrapped in this dirty rag, and he was showing us the bravery award, and he took a flower from me and cried."