Milan Herian

"Nothing was running, so I walked to work and only reached Černý Most. When I saw a lot of tanks there, I'd better go home to see what was going on. I'm not leaving them, the kids are small, so I went home. Well, then we were patrolling there. I worked in the Old Town Square. There were a lot of guns and machine guns and that. They were shooting at each other and it was not good. And then in '69, I was in Wenceslas Square when it started. By then the militia was already there, they started chasing people and the best experience was that they threw tear gas canisters at us, tear gas canisters, and one brave man or young man took it and threw it back into their car."

"Emmaus, it was a bombed-out monastery that was only repaired from the outside and the inside was dug up, the plaster was broken, because they kept looking for some gold and they couldn't find it, so they dug it up. There were graves that had been overturned, so this one guy came in, when they got it back, a Czech priest came in, but he was in Sweden, and he picked me to be his caretaker if I wanted to. So not only did I do the construction, but I had to learn the economics and I had to actually negotiate contracts with the tenants."