Alena Pitašová

"That was just unexpected. All of a sudden in the afternoon there were x number of cars, a lot of civilian cars. Terrible people came out of it. They came into my house. I was the only one there. I don't know where the girls were, if they were at their grandmother's... I don't know, they were sheltered from that poor thing. They would have been shocked and crying, it would have been terrible. And they came in and turned the whole house upside down. Not pulling out drawers and throwing things on the floor, but they went through everything. And there was no way to control it. They set up a desk in the living room and they started writing. Representatives from the MIA, now the municipal government, arrived. A lady came, like a social worker, because of the children, threatening to take my children away from me. A home search with everything. I had Vokno and all sorts of samizdat literature, but fortunately I had hidden it well so they wouldn't find it. I made a good hiding place. You couldn't tell. A policeman came up to me and said, 'If we want to get you, look here,' and he knocked on his uniform pocket and took out a plastic box, like tic tacs are now, and there were white granules in it. 'If we want to, we'll dump it here somewhere,' and that they'd catch me on drugs."

"We would get a text and our task was to copy it onto seven sheets of thin paper using carbon paper— that was its name. Then we had to pass it on to another seven people, who were also required to make seven copies. It wouldn’t go through more than that—the carbon paper could only handle about seven copies. The last one was barely readable. And this is how it was distributed."

"I was in Krkonoše in Pomezní Boudy, not far from the state border. We were sleeping. The occupation came from the 20th to the 21st of August. We were sleeping with my aunt and my uncle went down to smoke. Suddenly he ran up to my aunt and shouted: 'Jaruna, there's going to be a war! They attacked us.' And that's when I woke up to. As I was talking about it, that they were teaching us about the Americans and that there was going to be a war, they kept showing us movies, and I was so unhappy about it, and I said, 'But uncle, there's no way there's going to be a war. We have the Warsaw Pact.'"