Ing. Dalibor Gut

"Once we woke up in the morning and it was reported on the radio, so I felt like throwing up all morning, I don't even know if we went to school or not, but it must have been terrible experience. Since I came from a working class background, such a normal family, no dissidents, and at primary school we were fed [communist ideology], so I relatively believed it and I know that I always…I have a wonderful memory, when I brought something from my friends that was against ... anti-regime, so my dad kept always silence, he didn't want to make my life… or somehow he got around it, that I had to figure it out myself. So by the 68th, August 21st, because we had been just fooling around before, hanging out in the park, around the city, and so on, and now it dawned on us. Well, it was a terrible experience for me. They didn't let us go to Prague at all, because we all wanted to go to Prague, and of course, the supervisors and teachers understood that we couldn't at all, so we might have been there for a few days, and then we were allowed to go home, to parents."

"The regime, even though I really hated it, because we went to Czech Velenice now for Christmas and again for holidays, and basically the bakery was the last house before the wires. So we actually could see Gmünd, in Austria, but when we moved further towards the Austrian side, a hundred metres or fifty, there were almost the soldiers who had the watchtowers there. I have such a memory that there used to be a swimming pool, which was a short distance behind Velenice, it was watered by the Lužnice river. It dated probably back to the First Republic times, after the war no one would build it. And so that the people could go in there, every time it was nice weather they opened in the morning such a wire gate, one or two, I don't know exactly, and the whole swimming pool was surrounded with, I don't know, a five-metre fence. So they let us go through the wires and we, of course, bathed there and watched the girls, we were teenagers back then. And once it happened that some clothes were found there, I mean unattended, so the soldiers uncompromisingly drove us out of the swimming pool, because they thought that someone had climbed over the wires there, I have no idea. And they just kicked us out and a search was started and so on. It was really sad there, because we could actually go on one side. Uncle kept bees in a short distance, towards Nové Hrady, about ten kilometres from České Velenice, and so when we went there, [there was] the control again - they had already known him [uncle], so the soldiers already let him go. There were a kind of dugout shelters, so suddenly a soldier turned up beside the road and stopped you for a check. And when we were going to Velenice, we had to prove where we were going and so on, at Christmas or at any time, and it was a godforsaken country."