Professor, PhDr. Rudolf Šrámek , CSc.

"I took away two lessons from it: that there are classes in society, not antagonistic classes, but layers, and that there is someone who wants to control the relationship between those layers. And there was always this socialist revolution and internationalism, and it struck me as something absolutely strange, but which didn't concern me, because we felt international. We were brought up in a German school, we spoke German and we spoke Czech. So the 'internationalism' didn't manifest itself in us in any way, on the contrary, the roots of a certain dissatisfaction with the new situation were constantly being sown, and this was due to the fact that it was impossible to visit our relatives in West Germany. There was hardly a family there that did not have war invalids, the dead, prisoners and relatives somewhere in Germany. And that was suddenly abolished. And everybody cried out that this is freedom and suddenly this."

"There was a lot of Germanness, because the 1918-20 class was drafted into the Wehrmacht, so there was a big cry. It was a complete disaster, we lived in a house where there was a post office on the ground floor, and when this mail bus came and brought out a box or a bag, the postmistress would divide it up and now there was this long envelope and on it was the heading 'Oberkommando der deutschen Wehrmacht'. In front of the house there were these women with children in their arms whose husbands were in the war. And when she came out without the paper, it was comforting. But when she came out with the paper, there was tension about who had fallen, because it was an announcement that they had disappeared or fallen or something. And what I remember from that is the screaming and the loud crying of those women, those wives with those children, standing there on the road, now that group of women are breaking up, one crying, one not crying..."