Jiří Hlávka

"Street signs started getting torn down, slogans started appearing. I was writing huge menu boards for Hotel Bohemia that began with things like Brezhnev soup and Gomułka’s roasted rolls. Gomułka was a Polish politician back then, you know. I kept writing poems until one night, about a week later, a friend rang my doorbell around midnight. He handed me the poems back and said, ‘We don’t know each other, we’ve never met, you were never at Průboj (the newspaper), there’s someone else there now.’ Otherwise, I’d have ended up in jail, you know."

"On the night of August 20, around midnight, a 12-year-old girl started running around the camp screaming, holding a transistor radio and yelling that her mother had been shot in Liberec. Because the radio was broadcasting the troop invasion, and they said that a Russian soldier, a Soviet soldier had shot a lady in the square in Liberec, and they just said the initials. And she deduced from those initials that it was her mother, because her mother had those initials. I don't know how it turned out, but I know that in the morning at five o'clock Russian planes with red rockets started flying over our camp, which was originally a military facility, and they drove us out of the camp. And they drove us out so that we had to get on buses with the children, one tank in front of us, one tank behind us, and they took us all the way to Liberec and Ústí nad Labem."

"Because it was in '40, that's nine years after the war actually, so my friends who had a huge library, and I was a crazy reader, I read even with a flashlight under a blanket, and they had a huge collection of Verne books, and I used to go over and borrow Verne books from them. They lived in a house that you went into, you went through the yard and only in the yard were the entrances to the house, so in that yard they were, at the time I came to borrow Verne books, they were taking apart something they found in the woods in Satalice, it was a remnant of the war, it was, I know exactly what it looked like. They were dismantling it in an axe, hammer, file. And it exploded the moment I entered the yard. So it lifted me up to the first floor, broke all my fingers, tore the left side of my face and my eye off. Because at that time it happened several times in Satalice that a gas bomb exploded, so there was a gentleman who automatically hurriedly got into a car, came, loaded me and the two boys who were with me and took us to Bulovka, so that's how I lost my eye."