Pál Csáky

“I recall the atmosphere, mainly in that very first moment especially professional soldiers and officers were really nervous. One could not notice it so much in soldiers, but then the tanks were called up. Those were trained from the commander´s building up to reserve base with the exception of one tank that was under planned repair and didn´t have an engine. The boys were on the tanks and that´s when they started to wonder. I remember it was morning and we started to speculate what´s going on, why did we have to go out, to practice, but we still didn´t realize what was happening. So we waited about until two o´clock in the afternoon, when trucks arrived, they backed up to the tanks and began to load them with live ammunition. That´s when the atmosphere changed. The boys had just had their lunch and that´s when they began to realize something was going on when being armed with ball cartridges.”

“When they returned, I was finishing my duty, I guess it was around six, so I went to the company and yet then the boys were lodging in and the first lieutenant from the staff, the chemist, just came there. He was quite drunk and he said to me and my colleague to go to his office. So we went, he served us some drink and said we needed to celebrate as everything had luckily ended up well. He began to explain us that our units of the Warsaw pact moved towards the Polish borders and this way our western Czechoslovak borders remained uncovered. To this initiative the American and German units moved directly on the line. Suddenly, someone realized the protection was not effective there, and so they transferred them back.”