"Well, we were non-communists, so to speak, so there were two of us in the 7th Army PVOS, or the state air defense. One pilot at the airfield in Líně near Pilsen and me. It is a fact that we were not allowed to attend some of the meetings, or I was not allowed to attend some of the meetings. Well, I was a bit discriminated , I didn't mind it more or less, I was more trying not to have to stick my head in that communist noose. Because I was avoiding when they said, and why aren't you still a communist, so I said, I consider the Communist Party to be an exclusice, strictly exclusive organization, and if you recognize that I should join it, I will join it, while I was trembling with fear that it would come to that."
"Then I experienced the fifty-third year, when Stalin died, Gottwald died and there was the currency reform, that was the most important thing, that stuck in my mind. Because my mother went with to exchange, to exchange money, and came back with eighty-four crowns and some change. And she was crying because she said, I don't know how I'm going to feed you."
"Well, normally I was serving, we were woken up, wait, what day was it, the twenty-first of August... But it wasn't a Sunday, I think... Well, in short, I was sleeping like a baby, at night we were woken up at about two o'clock in the morning, a live combat alert, which was fishy, because it was the first and last time I experienced a live combat alert. Otherwise it was an alarm, or a combat alarm... We had thirty minutes to get to the barracks, man all our functional positions on the machines, do what we called a functional check of the complex, pull the nets off the missiles, the missiles swung in the direction from which the targets were being given, and we waited for the command to fire. The command to fire did not come, on the contrary, the command came to turn it off and so on..."
Oldřich Holub was born on 22 October 1943 in Prague. After his mother fell ill, his aunt in Třemošná near Pilsen took care of him and his sister. He remembers the currency reform in 1953, which resulted in the family losing money. He went to school first in Mariánské Lázně, then in Prague from the seventh grade. He wanted to become a mechanic for Tesla, but failed the entrance exam. In Mariánské Lázně he trained as an electrical fitter and electrician and worked in the field for a year. At the company he worked as a cultural officer for the Czechoslovak Youth Union. He was offered to join the army and Oldřich agreed. In 1961-1964 he studied at the military college in Liptovský Mikuláš, then served until 1974 in Preštice as a technician of the surface-to-air missile guidance radar. He was a competitive shooter for many years. He never joined the Communist Party. In August 1968 he experienced the only live combat alert in his military career. In 1974, he was discharged from the army and for a long time could not get a job. Eventually he worked as manager of a Kovomat electrical shop until 1988. He had two children with his first wife, and today (2019) he is married for the second time and lives in Podivin.
