Ladislav Tázlar

“I returned to Semily quite shocked. I walked through some back alleys and I reached the Wenceslas Square. I saw the fresh bullet holes on the wall of the Museum. People were gathering there, cars were passing through, and people were holding flags which were stained with blood. Suddenly I could see that the reaction was inadequate. Absolutely inadequate to the fact that somebody wanted to reform the country here – that is, to improve the current state of affairs – and the ensuing reaction was a brutal and reckless force. Well, so I arrived to Semily. I did not even go to any gatherings, but at one such meeting I expressed my opinion that they were our brothers and that we did thank them for the liberation in 1945, but that when my brother, who lives in Pecka, comes to help me, he does not kick the door of my house open at midnight and say: ‘I have come to help you!’ Nothing happened for a while, but then they investigated it and I was reminded that I had not understood the meaning of the arrival of the armies.”

“Male and female comrades were crying there and one of them suggested to me that we go to the building of the Radio and appeal to young people there so that no incident would happen, and that we should speak to these people. He had been probably tasked to do something like that. And as an idiot, I went with him. We came there and there were the tanks. You know it, the images were then shown, with the boys, or soldiers, and Molotov cocktails, bottles with some flammable liquids and they were trying to extinguish it with some blanket. One of them perhaps got a little burnt, or I don’t know why. And suddenly people started shouting: ‘Shaiba, shaiba!’ as if cheering ice hockey players during a match. One of the soldiers then sprayed the people with bullets. I witnessed that wave of people which engulfed me as well. People started running away, right, and we squeezed in into that passage over the Radio building. And a girl in that passage started screaming that her partner, a young guy, got hit. He was lying there in a puddle of blood. They looked at him. At the back there was only a small entry wound, a swollen spot where the bullet entered the body. But when they turned him over, it all spilled out from him.”

“Well, there was an apartment and a job offer as well, and we could have received all this there. But I had my friends here, and my parents, and I am of a sensitive character. As he was passing me that document, the offer… I still have it here, I said this to him. When he was handing me over that offer, there were lit candles in the room, and Swiss fondue, it is their special meal, and music was playing. I still remember it as if it happened today. He played the 1812 Overture, Tchaikovsky, great music, composed when they overcame Napoleon. And he also had a set of gramophone records, it was something quite new for me, he had it stacked into a kind of a pyramid shape, and among the records there, he had Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9. And I told him: ‘Listen, this Dvořák – when he felt sad, he composed music. They wanted him to compose American music and to create their national anthem for them. But he could not do it, he was a Czech musician. And in this Symphony No. 9, this Largo, and so on, these are sensitive things. It is Czech music, but if he had felt too sad, he would have been able to buy tickets for a steamboat and it would have taken him a while, but he would have been able to come back. But in my case, I would be able to get to the country’s border in an hour, but I would not be able to cross it.’”