Karel Pokorný

"We lived on Mirove namesti (Peace square=square in the central Prague). The whole night we could hear the planes above our heads. People used to have this mechanism - we called it wire radio. It was a radio with only one station. It was very convenient; you couldn’t listen to anything else. It worked through the wire, not through the antenna, so the signal was always first quality one. We had this mechanism at home too. It started to broadcast at about 5am. They kept repeating the same: This morning the associated troops of Soviet army crossed our borders. It all happened without any knowledge of Mr. President or the Prime minister...They were asking for people to stay calm. It just kept repeating itself. As I was still half asleep I thought it’s some kind of radio game. But as I woke up completely I realized that it was not any game. I have had this funny feeling already a couple of days ago. My parents lived in Trebicska Street, which was very close to the Sokol gym, so I told to myself I have to go there to see them. My mom was working in one of the offices in the Radio. I was thinking: I just hope that my mom didn’t go to work today, it will be crowded around the Radio as usual."

"My life wasn’t really that dramatic. We left to my wife’s cousin. He left to his wife’s cousin and so on. A lot of people were leaving at that time. Basically it was without any struggles. The offices were mainly cooperating. All you needed was an invitation letter. Even fake one. The border lines were not open anymore though. For us, all we needed to get the permission to leave the country was an invitation from my wife’s cousin. Then we received this stamp note in our passports that we are allowed to leave. All the three of us received it - me, my wife and our not even one year old son too. We left by train to Schwäbisch Gmündu, located nearby Stuttgart. A lot of the Sudetenland Germans settled down there. Or Germans who were not withdrawn and they knew many Czechs here. There was a lot of Czechs living in these Sudetenland regions."

"That was the emigration. One of my Sokol brothers (Scouts) refused to carry the flag during the Sokol parade in Zurich, because there were the STB agents from Prague (STB=former communist secret state police) sitting in the audience. I must have carried the flag; because I was embarrassed to admit I was afraid of them too. I’m not saying that all the people who emigrated were chickens. This was only one example of the situation when the leader of the Sokol association wouldn’t dare to carry the flag in his freedom country. The Sokol festival took its place in Switzerland. He was afraid that someone from Prague may take a picture of him. That’s what exile is about too."

"My life philosophy is that all your life you should try to be as much as tolerant as you can toward everything except for the violence. Live and let to live - this I would call my life credo. With all my heart I denounce any kind of extremism, if I may say so myself."

"Well they came with tanks...As I said the regime wasn’t so powerful anymore. It wasn’t as dramatic as in Hungary...Nobody was thinking let’s disarm them and shoot them. We suggested they better go back home. That was“great". We told them: Go and have yourself hanged up somewhere beyond Ural. Someone set the tank on fire. To be honest, personally I was surprised that things didn’t get any worse. This aversion against Russians, they actually stayed very calm and behaved nicely. If I only imagine that we would do the same things like attacking the soldiers, calling them bad names etc. in 1939 when the German army came, it would have been a real disaster. But that didn’t happen with the Russian army. I would be naive to believe it was a pure humanity from them, but you just couldn’t overlook that these soldiers were perfectly trained to remain calm and not respond. I can hardly imagine that someone would make an order to shoot at the National Theater. The soldier’s nerves were tided as can be...But as I said already; when I stood in front of the Radio I expected the disaster..."

At the beginning it was rather reward for good behavior. For it is very easy to convince any child. You’ll get to wear a white shirt with the red tie, but you have to keep good grades at school, because this and this was a good student too. I have seen this kind of surrender among kids. I grew up in Vinohrady (part of Prague), just a few yards from the Czech Radio building. And this part of Prague was bourgeois as can be. This was the businessmen region. But even children from these families found it (communism) interesting or cool before they got older and smarter. You could see them being so proud wearing this red tie. I think this is the biggest crime of the totality regimes. It is easy to talk the kids into something, you simply give them some opinion, these Pavlik Morozov or this Pavlik Korchagin...Pavlik spayed on his grandpa...Pavlik Morozov was a hero for those little pioneer kids. Unlike Pavka Korchagin, he was a fighter...You just flew through this regime with sort of half disgust. The parents were kind of scared. My dad taught me this anti regime feeling mostly before the year 1968, after that he was afraid to do anything politically incorrect. The people were disappearing. It happened a lot in Vinohrady. The government has moved out inconvenient executive officers or those who worked for the army or police. I used to have a friend whose father was a STB agent .He moved into our house in a flat in which some police officer lived before. Of course we didn’t know who he was. He’s always acted nice. We had no idea, that his job was beat the confessions out of innocent people. But that’s how it was. We didn’t hate it as much as our parents did. And our parents had to be very careful too."