"On the 19th of August we left for Holland for the races. So we left Hradiště on the 19th of August, spent the night in Stříbro and then we drove from there to Holland. We arrived in Holland, we arrived there in the evening, so we checked in, all kinds of things, and in the morning, around four o'clock, there was an alarm that just Czechoslovakia had been invaded by the troops. We were all in a state of shock, even the Dutch - we had normal interpreters there - how is it possible that we were attacked, that the USSR, well, the whole Warsaw Pact, that they just came to liberate us. So I've got pictures of that, too, even in the magazine, taken. So there was nothing else to do, we turned on the radio, now we were all sitting in front of it and we were listening to the news, what was going on here, that there were tanks everywhere in Prague and so on. And we didn't want to believe it, that it was impossible, we had been friends, all of a sudden, that they would... What did they want to liberate? There was nothing going on here."
"The biggest problem was that when my brother left to serve his military service, he knew he had a certain place in the ATK (Army Physical Education Club) in Dukla, but what about me. And finally I got a draft notice that said to go to Brno for an examination, and then when I got the order it said airborne troops, Prešov! You can imagine what it must have been like at home, when my brother went to Prague to play sports and I got the airborne troops Prešov. My mother almost had a heart attack, she started to cry: 'You want to jump with a parachute, do you want to kill yourself or what?' Well, it couldn't be helped, but it was an order, so I had to obey it. So they absolutely couldn't accept that one would be in Prešov and one would be in Prague."
"I remember a lot about the war because we lived right on the square where the bomb shelters were dug. So when the siren went off, we usually ran to hide in the shelters. Mostly people who didn't have a cellar, but we had a cellar in that house because that's where the pub was. There were kegs of beer and so on, and there were boards on top of that, and when the siren went off, all of us who lived in that house would always go down to the cellar and lie on those boards so we'd have a way to get down there. We were never hidden in the house, we were always in the basement. We used to walk around that square and when the siren would go off we would immediately run, run home, just to hide. Otherwise, I also remember when they were taking the bells off the church, off the tower (because it was all taken to the factory to be melted down and made into weapons or something like that), that we were standing opposite our house, there was a trader named Žatka, and we saw how they were lowering [the bells] down the tower onto a truck with ropes and taking them away. And otherwise, mostly, when we had nothing to do, we would run around in those shelters, we were always playing hide and seek there."
Zdeněk Hájek was born together with his twin brother Antonín on 20 June 1938 in Uherské Hradiště. He had a brother František, seven years older. His father Antonín Hájek was a stove maker and ran tiling business in Uherské Hradiště, his mother Helena, née Kotková, was a housewife. The family was religious. After the war, his father joined the Communist Party, in 1948 his trade was nationalized, then he worked in a district construction company. Mother later cleaned in Mesit Mařatice. Zdeněk and his brother Antonín were the youngest members of the rowing club VK Morávia in Uherské Hradiště, and at the apprenticeship school they took up competitive athletics. Zdeněk in running, Antonín in pole vaulting. In 1953-1955, the witness trained as a locksmith and car mechanic in Nová Paka, and later worked for the Roads Uherské Hradiště company. In 1957-1959 he served in the 22nd Airborne Brigade in Prešov. Afterwards he worked in municipal services, first in a locksmith’s shop, then as a welder at the construction of the ice rink in Uherské Hradiště, where he subsequently stayed on as a supervisor of the ice rink. After five years he went to work as the manager of the Uherské Hradiště Municipal Spa. After that he worked as a technical deputy manager of the Zelenina (Vegetables) company, for this job he started distance study at secondary school of economics, where he graduated in 1984. In 1978 he participated as a referee in the European Athletics Championships in Prague. After the revolution he founded a tyre service in Uherské Hradiště, retiring in 2005. From his first marriage he has sons Přemysl (1961) and Robert (1970). In 1982 he married for the second time, after ten years he divorced. In 2023 he was living in Uherské Hradiště.
