Miroslav Benda

"He says, 'Benda, I have a surprise for you! I've got tickets, we're going to the Spartakiad!' Well, we couldn't... I said, 'Well, let's see.' So we went to the Spartakiad. There I said the historic words. There was a lady sitting next to me, and she said, 'This is beautiful! Those red flags! Those red flags! It's beautiful! How it waves, it's beautiful!' And when there were a lot of flags, she - my wife says you can split wood on me, but you mustn't hit the gnarl- she hit the gnarl. I said, 'Madam, there are quite a few red flags here, and I'll tell you something. We Sokols built this stadium here, I have pictures of it, and we're going to come back here one day. The wheel of fate is running. And she says, 'Well, you guys are so different over there in Moravia...' And my wife says, 'Stop it, or they'll arrest you.' I say, 'They won't, because I said my piece.' And then when we were there at the meeting, my wife says, 'So I remembered that you said we'd come back here one day, and we're here at the meeting, at the stadium.'"

"Coincidence again. I was lucky with those coincidences. I came to the office in Podivín. When we were staying there, we always paid some kind of fee for the accommodation, and now a gentleman leaves and says to her, 'Well, Růži, hello!' And he was leaving. I said, 'Mrs. Ustohalova, I heard a Sokol greeting here.' 'Yes, Mr. Benda, are you a Sokol?' I said, 'From birth!' And she says, 'My husband used to be the mayor of the Sokol, and I have a daughter in America, and I go there to see her, and I go there with tears to those monuments of ours.' Well, and I always went there when I went to pay, and I said, 'Yes, Mrs., yes, Mr. Benda, come in half an hour, I have some errands to run.' I didn't tell anybody in Fruta. I went there for 15 years, and we talked about the Sokol with this Mrs. Ustohalová. And when it was over, she said to me, 'Well, brother Benda, that's how we worked out."

"There were people here who were glad to get into the JZD, to tell the truth. The kind of bankrupt farmers that I knew - the horses so that it [barely ] stood on its feet, they were the first ones. And the one - I won't name him - he was so bankrupt, the horses... So he became the chairman of the JZD. Because for him it was a liberation, the JZD."

"We stopped there, at the inn... and I remember such a stupid thing... and the wife of the innkeeper was on the bus and she let her let her tongue run loose and they arrested her. She was swearing at the regime. They had a butcher shop, a pub. And my colleague says, 'Where's your landlady? We were told at work that she broke her leg...' 'Oh no, she let her let her tongue run loose in the bus and they locked her up for a month. She was swearing at the regime.'"