Petr Čermák

"What you feel? When you row, you don't feel being low on oxygen, you just feel increased fatigue. It shows in the time; you don't deliver the time you would deliver at a lower altitude. The suffocation also showed in the fact that we didn't do the finals with a full crew. Milan Hurtala choked internally in the initial race, meaning... I may get a bit technical and not completely correct now, but he ended up with swollen liver and kidneys. He couldn't recover for the finals, so we went with a substitute. I should point out that we weren't the only ones. There were several other eights who went with a substitute. The West Germans had counted on it, they had substitutes for most posts, but we didn't. We had to take whoever was available. We took Kolesa from a two with [the coxswain], they didn't make it to the next round and were available for the finals. I can't blame him for not fitting in with the eight, but the fact is that the two with [a coxswain] is the slowest discipline and the eight is the fastest discipline. The way they cut the water is utterly different. It was a handicap for him and for us. The training sessions we did with him were fine, it's just that it's not two kilometres. You do one-minute bits, five hundred, two hundred metres, but never two kilometres."

"You know, it was already thawing before 1968. I may not be a revolutionary, but the situation began to improve under President Antonín Novotný already. It was completely different from the 1950s. Of course, everybody expected something radical to happen during the Prague Spring. At that time, the Olympics were the primary event for us and we perceived this, but we were more focused on sport than on what was happening around us. We had a hard time swallowing up the invasion, though, that I remember clearly. I know Venca Kozák was an officer and he said this memorable sentence: 'Give me a gun, I'm an officer and I'm going to fight.' It was silly, of course, but he voiced what we were all feeling."

"It was the perfect, beautiful autumn weather. No emergencies the whole time, except for the final the wind picked up so hard they had to interrupt and wait for two hours until the wind turned around and blew as an almost perfect headwind. They said it was correct though it wasn't completely so. But, whatever, let it blow, you have to take that into account. By delaying the start, the eights were running in complete darkness. We got to the start and the sun was just setting. The course was west to east, and as we rounded the buoy I saw the red sun disappear on the horizon. It's pretty down south, so the sun set and it got totally dark. There was a road on the shore, with cars driving and headlights shining, and flares shooting at the finish. We could see how the competitors were doing, everyone. It wasn't so dark that we didn't know there were the Americans on the right, and on the left the Yugoslavs, the Russians, the Germans, the Italians. The coxswain gives you instructions. You're not allowed to look around, but everybody looks, even though they should hold on to the oar and work it as hard as they can."

"Dukla's rowing club was in Terezín. When I was in the draft office, I had to do some formal stuff, take a medical examination, and then they asked me where I wanted to go, what weapon. There were engineers in Terezín, the scum of the army, and I was told before: 'To avoid complications, say you want to join the engineers.' So they asked me, 'Comrade, which weapon would you like to serve with?' I said the engineers, and the guy says, 'That's strange, considering you completed an engineering high school. You could sit comfortably on a radar truck and watch planes flying over Europe on a screen, how about that?' I said I wanted to join the engineers in Terezín. He turned to the scribe: 'He's totally dumb. Register him for Terezín, engineers.' When I enlisted, they took us to Bohušovice, about three kilometres away from Terezín, there's no train service. Even though there was an old track from the Nazi ghetto era, they put us on a truck and dropped us off in the Terezín barracks yard. Shortly before that, the film Transport from Paradise was made there, and so the barracks still had those gothic letters on them, twisted German letters, 'Block 1A', 'Block 4'. I thought, 'What a treat, these inscriptions - isn't it great? Two years in here!"

"I remember 1948, a short stretch again. There were three houses next to each other where I lived. I was friends with the Černý family, Mr. Černý was a great man. I remember I was just playing with the boys when Mr. Černý... You see, we had a single-tube radio, and you couldn't hear anything when the sun was shining on it; you couldn't even receive Prague 1. He says, 'Go to your dad and tell him it's too bad, they've elected Gottwald as the president.' I ran down the street yelling, 'It's too bad, Dad, they've elected Gottwald as the president!' My mom yelled at me to shut up and go home. I remember the trials in the 1950s, via radio again. I remember the screechy voice of Attorney General Urválek; that's an experience I still hear to this day."