“It was summer, maybe you learnt in school that on the 21st of August 1968 Russian tanks arrived, but for someone who wasn't there it's just a date. Back then, I was in Slovakia with my father, we were in High Tatra mountains and lived in a beautiful village under Tatra mountains. I was thirteen and one morning, very early, there was a knock on the door and the gentleman with whom we'd been staying answered. He was a senior teacher, his name was Ján Michalko, a really nice, elderly man that I respected. And suddenly I saw him in a white nightshirt, with a white hat with a small pompom, which looked ridiculous to me, I was laughing. And he said in a serious tone, with a radio next to his ear: “Doctor, it is bad, the Russians are here!” My father froze and said: “What do you mean, the Russians are here?” “Occupation, come downstairs to watch the TV.” And so we watched the TV and my father said: “I knew it would all end badly.” And really, in the village where we lived, behind the village was the road connecting Košice and Žilina, it was not a highway back then, just a first-class main road that goes under the Tatra mountains. And that place was already roaring with heavy vehicles, transporters, with ten, fifteen metres between them – they weren't tanks, those would have destroyed the road, but they were heavy vehicles, armoured personal carriers, I think. And these heavy vehicles would sometimes be pulling a cannon or something and it was a huge noise. And these vehicles, with about ten metres of distance between them, kept coming maybe for a week.”
