Milan Bouška

"Then there was 1969, which was the anniversary of August 21. And the soldiers and the People's Militias occupied Míru Square, the fire trucks came there, it was all paved over. My mother, who was there with us, was telling those soldiers if they were going to shoot at us. They laughed and said no, but it was cool, then the firemen came there and there was pavement everywhere, cat heads they called it. And they swept these people's feet and it went all the way to the Jirchářovi, and the women had their skirts hitched up and some guy was yelling, that we all should to stand in front of the shop windows. So, I stood with my friend and my mother in the window of today's archive, where they used to sell gramophone records."

"I joined Pionýr somehow, but in 1968 some students were on a hunger strike in front of Bohemka and there was a basket where they threw the party's membership cards, so I threw my Pioneer membership card there, the next day I took it there with one of my friends, I was thirteen. I have a great experience from 1968, the Russian soldiers moved up, there was a big barracks on Terasa. There were Czech soldiers there, a kind of residual company, where the Russians moved in, occupied those barracks with Czech soldiers and set up a patrol. I lived two hundred meters away from them, I used to walk past them to school. They were distributing collaborators' news and newspapers there, and once I went to this Russian, because I already knew a little Russian, so I told him that the news was a lie and that I would bring him Rudé právo, at that time it was trying to write some sort of truth. And I immediately told him that he probably couldn't read because he was Russian, and he cried, the soldier, he had a machine gun. I was looking at it like a fool, and I ran home, and I told my dad that I made a Russian cry, and my dad asked me what he said. So, I told him he said he wasn't Russian, he was from Riga. And Dad told me that they were as bad off since the war as we are now. Those were the three Nordic countries that the Russians have occupied since the war like we are now."