Josef Zdráhal

“Planes passing over us woke me at 4AM or at 5AM maybe. We turned on the radio and realised what was going on. My father reminded me: 'See? What did I tell you? They won´t let us go.' We were listening to the radio as back then we didn´t have TV. Then I went out and I saw tanks in the streets. I was in shock. After a few days, the district headquarters of the Soviet Army had been established in Nový Jičín. There were no Hungarian or Polish soldiers, just Russians. And I would go there with Pavel Majkus, trying to explain the situation to officers. They had their own opinion. They talked about counterrevolution and stated that they came to save us. And we were telling them that that wasn´t the point. We haven´t met the regular soldiers as they were camping in tents in the fields and meadows. The Soviets would stay for maybe a month. After that, they had been relocated to barracks in Frenštát.”

“We had been planning that we would burn flags, Soviet ones, of course, by self-ignition. And we asked this window dresser to draw us some caricatures of the Soviet Army and the Communist Party Central Committee (ÚV KSČ). He promised us that he would do that and indeed made few of these, but then his father found out and destroyed everything. I can´ t remember exactly what had happened. We wanted to burn the flags on the second anniversary of the occupation. We found this chemist who studied at a college at that time, he agreed and told us that such a thing was possible. We couldn´t proceed with the plan. We wanted to harm the Russians whenever we had a chance.”