"There were plane flyovers every now and then. So there were air raids. Sirens were blaring. Sirens started blaring. As soon as the sirens started blaring, we went right [to the shelter] because we didn't know what, when it was going to be. Nobody knew when the bombs were going to fall on us. Nobody knew when it was coming or not coming. We thought Budějovice was not that important. It was believed that there would be no bombing. That it was in that March in '45, nobody could have known."
"We were sixty-eight at the cottage. Our neighbour said, 'Hurry, hurry, go away, because the Russians have come.' We said to ourselves that this was impossible. So we took the car and we drove home hurry, hurry - with the children. Then we said what we could see here. So we came home and we saw the madhouse. There were Russians driving in the streets. Right in our street, right in our windows, it was the Hungarian army there with us, a general - a Hungarian - was pointing a machine gun at our window. The older boy [son], he was already 14 years old. He was already understood a little bit, so he was very scared. It was terrible. When you think of a boy with a machine gun pointing directly at your windows. That was just unbearable."
"The next day was the air raid on Budejice, when a lot of people died. They bombed the neighbourhood around the station and the whole station. And they also bombed the Gestapo. I was hiding in the cellar. In those days, during the war, shelters had to be set up. That's where we hid. We had a sofa there, and we sat on that sofa. We could hear the house swaying like that. That was quite difficult. Fortunately, the bomb fell about 300 metres from us. The house lost the first floor when the bomb fell. It lost the first floor and about three people died. It was a coincidence that the bomb fell 300 metres from us, otherwise we would have been dead. And my friend from school, with whom I was sitting in the classroom, died in that air raid."
Jiří Kuboušek was born on 20 March 1933 as the second child of Maria and Václav Kuboušek in České Budějovice. His father worked as a postal clerk. His mother took care of the household and grew vegetables for sale in the large garden. At the age of five he became a member of Sokol. His father had to be interrogated by the Gestapo during the war. He experienced the great bombing of České Budějovice on 23 and 24 March 1945. In May 1945 he witnessed the arrival of American and Russian troops in České Budějovice. He participated in the XI All-Sokol Meeting in Prague in 1948. He describes the change of atmosphere in the Sokol movement in the second half of the 1940s. After graduating from high school, he started a two-year extension course at the Secondary Industrial School of Construction. In 1965 he graduated from the Czech Technical University. He then worked as a civil engineer in several companies in České Budějovice. He witnessed the arrival of Warsaw Pact troops in České Budějovice. He did not sign a consent for the arrival of Warsaw Pact troops during the vetting after 1968. Although he was offered membership in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia every year at work from the early 1970s until 1989, he never joined the party. At the time of filming (2023), Jiří Kuboušek lived in České Budějovice.
Jiří Kuboušek with colleagues from Stavoprojekt, moving a boulder from the Novohradské hory Mountains to the building of the Museum of the Workers' and Revolutionary Movement (now one of the buildings of the South Bohemian Library) in České Budějovice, 1978
Jiří Kuboušek with colleagues from Stavoprojekt, moving a boulder from the Novohradské hory Mountains to the building of the Museum of the Workers' and Revolutionary Movement (now one of the buildings of the South Bohemian Library) in České Budějovice, 1978
