“... The next day [after the demonstration against the occupation on August 21, 1969] we thought we were going home, we were a little worried about what would be at home. We were starting to realize what we did. And when we went on the tram that tram which now stands on Wenceslas Square, you know the old one there, so we stood there. And now we saw actual bloody spots. And I completely stuck. I said, 'Lada, look at this. This is a human blood! 'And there I said to him and to myself:' So, I ended up with that Bolshevik here. ' We are in the evening ... I will come back to it, I have experienced that we are ... I stood somewhere near the wall and now the shot. And a man who was maybe two meters away from me fell down, yeah. Now I realized what was happening. And with those stains. You know, the worst part was that if they were foreign, yeah, the Russians or the Germans, you would understand. But they were their own people... ”
“In the evening we went into the streets and came across a barricade, which was like a vision to us. We felt like in 1945. And I just remember it was that the barricade was somehow in the light. In front of that ... behind that barricade there were a few people, they had no weapons, only some cobblestones. I was standing a little behind or we were standing behind. Someone threw the brick at the cops, the members. And it was like an impulse. I don't know if they hit anyone, I'm not aware of that anymore. I would rather say no, because it was further. However, they ran and began to liquidate it there. And I ... we ran. I just remember turning around and behind me about ten meters or how much was that one cop pointing a gun at me, and then I heard a shot. Of course he didn't hit me that it was already dark, I ran away, so we went back to the hotel and... ”
“We said to each other, so it is the 21st, we will go to St. Wenceslas’s square. So, we slowly walked down the aisles. And we came to the bottom of Wenceslas´s Square, where people suddenly began to gather. And we set in motion. Suddenly, we found out that we were in the third row of a huge parade of people who were slowly moving through St. Wenceslas´s square. I remember singing the anthem. People were waving at us, supporting us a lot, and we... as if for a moment I believed it would break and something new would come. And so we went, such a moment, maybe ten fifteen minutes before we passed it. We came in front of Wenceslas, not even realizing it, and suddenly I saw those members running from behind the statue. And so I thought of the only thought at the moment that I ran out of the third row forward, that friend stayed somewhere, and along the first row I turned right, like that. I got a few blows with the batons, but they didn't catch me. And I ran into Ve Smečkách Street, which is still there today, and into some passage, and there the lady actually hid us in such a toilet or where. I guess we were four or five. I know she then told us that they had beaten almost down and pulled away one boy, a young man. Well, in about an hour we probably ... I went out and now I came to Wenceslas´s square because I didn't know where else to go. There were armored personnel carriers on that Wenceslas Square, at a distance of twenty meters. Like this, stacked from top to bottom. It was, it was so depressing. And in the left-hand side from above was a cordon of cops. Those members. So, we went through those cordons, there was a little soul in me. Some of them shouted at us, there were more of us. ,It is surely them!‘ But nothing happened, I walked down St. Wenceslas´s square down to about two thirds, then I turned. So, it was the 21st of August.”
Miloš Vavrečka was born on March 9, 1952 in Ostrava. Since his childhood his grandfather Alois was his moral ideal, a guerrilla messenger in the anti-Nazi resistance, who went through an imprisonment in the Small Fortress Terezín and Dachau and died on May 11, 1945. Miloš Vavrečka entered a secondary grammar school during the Prague Spring. There he experienced a short period of an open and independent intuition. He experienced the occupation by Soviet troops in 1968 with his family at home, with great worries and fear that there would be a war. A year later, on August 21, 1969, he was a direct participant in the massive demonstrations in Prague, which were brutally suppressed by the Czechoslovak repressive forces. Frustrated by the powerlessness of normalization in the 1970s, he wrote a letter in which he openly expressed his views and sent it to three friends. The letters, however, captured the StB and Milos Vavrecka subsequently underwent interrogation at the StB in Opava. He had never signed Charter 77, but refused to engage in any way, and eventually switched from his clerical position to manual work. He found solacement in faith. In the 1980s he personally met Cardinal František Tomášek. He spent November 17, 1989 at the Synod of the Evangelical Church in Prague. After the revolution he studied at the theological faculty and until his retirement he worked as an evangelical pastor. He is literary active, published three collections of poetry.
Zlínská literární tržnice (http://zlinska-literarni-trznice.cz)
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