"I experienced the sixty-eight in Prague. It was wild. I was hanging around the radio. Even though I was still a young kid, maybe because I'd gotten a whiff of the army, maybe I prevented the deaths of ten, fifteen other people there. When they were coming from the top, even in that crazy situation, I, a soldier, appreciated that they, without any aiming while driving, shot the tram wires. We went into one entrance, there were about ten to fifteen of us. We hadn't even had time to slam the door before a man, an old man compared to me, about forty, run inside. He was wearing a leather jacket that was a little worn. From his pocket he pulled out, I call it a syringe, 6.35 calibre. It was a little thing, used to be called a woman's gun. He tried to force this syringe on us to use it. When that came out of him, I thought I was gonna get a stroke. I asked him if he realized what we were gonna do with it. He gave me a stupid look. I couldn’t care less. He didn't say anything, turned around and walked away. Then when I remembered that I thought to myself that all of us being in that hallway, there wasn't even a cover anywhere, frankly, if somebody starts shooting at me, and it doesn't matter if it's a syringe or a machine gun, I'm going to empty the magazine into it. So, what would it be? Slaughter!"
"Be that as it may, I cannot remove it of myself. Likewise, I wondered if you asked me the question, if I knew what I know today, if I would do it again. So, the biggest trouble is that I would almost tell you that I would. Because at the time it happened, I lived in the belief that we had to defend this republic. For me personally, that 1968, aside from the entry of Russian troops, there were a lot of pretty wild signals for me that I didn't see as being anything positive. The Krauts would go around Moravia to some of the villages and bring cement and bricks and tell people to take care of it, that they would come and get it in a few days. I am strongly anti-German. I still have it in me to this day and I know why I have it in me."
"We rode to Zagreb, and from there they took us in the Tatras to us. The worst thing was that you went and now you saw darkness, no light, you knew, you felt that the houses on your right hand were absolutely lifeless. Occasionally one of those dogs, there were a lot of them. For me, the disrespect for human life itself was bad enough. When there's a war, fine, when there's armed forces fighting each other, fine. But here it's the old people, the disabled, women and children who are the first to suffer. And the most horrible experience, it was the slaughtered children, tortured, slaughtered, lying there like buns, one next to the other, everywhere. Bullets in their heads, burnt feet."
Karel Štěpánovský was born in 1949 in Prague. His father died in his childhood. He grew up with his two younger brothers, cared for by his mother and grandmother; during his mother‘s long-term hospitalization, the brothers were in the care of an aunt. Because the witness assaulted his stepfather, who beat his mother, the authorities took the brothers away from their mother and they went to children‘s homes. The witness entered the Jan Žižka z Trocnova Military High School in Moravská Třebová. After graduating, he studied at the Antonín Zápotocký Military Academy in Brno. At the beginning of the 1970s, he joined the motorized riflemen in Domažlice at the rank of lieutenant, where he signed a cooperation with the Military Counterintelligence. Due to health problems, he had to transfer to the Regional Military Administration in Ústí nad Labem, where he dealt with cooperation between the army and schools as well as civil defence education in schools. In 1989 he left for an independent department of the Ministry of Education. After 1990 he returned to the Regional Military Administration in Ústí nad Labem. In 1993 he participated in a foreign military mission in the former Yugoslavia. In 2000 he was a member of the Operational Section of the General Staff of the Army of the Czech Republic. He retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel in 2003. In 2022 he lived in Chomutov. The witness could be recorded thanks to the support from the city of Chomutov.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
