"I remember the occupation of Rokytnice through Bartošovice, the tanks started to arrive. And at that time, when the tanks were coming in and they hadn't gone to the barracks yet, but they were there behind Rokytnice in the woods... My daddy, as a doctor, used to drive an ambulance, and he used to go around the mountains. It was fear and danger, what was going to happen. Above the ambulance flew a big white banner with a red cross; it looked menacing. Nowadays, we're used to it because there are different football games, and I don't know what, and that flag can appear anywhere... I know that as a child, it seemed threatening to me. My dad – when he went with the ambulance – I was so worried about him. He used to ride in the ambulance with the flag on it, and he describes that he was actually stopped once by a Russian patrol. Russia, as huge as it is, has some Uzbeks. I don't know who, but somewhere in the north at the time. And they were asking if it was some kind of swastika. A red cross. There, those who help wear a red crescent. So that was absolutely the biggest fear I had as a kid."
"Then came military service, and because of what he had done, his conflict with the law, he joined the PTP [Technical auxiliary battalions - transl.]. There, he said, he didn't even get a knife to cut bread, let alone a gun, and he served for two years. When the PTP was coming to an end, it was ordered by the government that the service be extended by twenty-one months, so as he described it, suicides and various escapes were actually on the daily order. Those guys were just exhausted. Sometimes when he described life there, he talked about the cold and hunger. Just like it was in the movies. There were students, various lawyers, they were intelligent people, and there were also priests. He said they titled themselves sir, which was very much against the wishes of the politruks there. I also remember that he said, for example, that although they didn't have food, they played chess, which he learned there very well. They made chess out of bread crumbs."
"More out of youthful indiscretion, as he sometimes described it, he wanted to leave the republic, and he and another friend decided to go abroad. They set off, and when they arrived at the border, they were probably either spotted, they don't know to this day, or they were outright denounced and then detained at the border. If somebody was detained at the border, they immediately went to prison. So he and this friend were sentenced as juveniles, because their age was not that high yet, so they got six months in prison."
Vlasta Gallová was born on 20 January 1958 in Ostrava. Her father, Václav Boček, tried to emigrate when he was young, got arrested, imprisoned and sentenced to six months of forced labour. He spent his military service in the PTP. He worked as a miner and in agriculture. Eventually, he managed to study medicine at the University of Pilsen. Her mother, Libuše Bočková, née Huspeková, was a teacher. The whole family moved from Nezvěstice in the Pilsen region to Rokytnice v Orlických horách in 1966. Her father worked as a country doctor, her mother as a teacher. Vlasta Gallová graduated from the Secondary Pedagogical School in Litomyšl. After graduation, she worked for seven years as a teacher in a small kindergarten near Rokytnice v Orlických horách. Then, until the end of her professional life, she worked as a teacher and later as the director of a kindergarten in Rokytnice v Orlických horách. While working, she graduated from university. Vlasta Gallová is married and has three children. She retired in 2022. In 2024, at the time of filming, she was a member of the town council of Rokytnice v Orlických horách.
