Ilona Horáčková

"We lived next to Stromovka, where the Russians were. Not only Russians, but all those poor people from those Soviet republics who were really scared, I must say. They were totally confused. I don't have any, like, they were not allowed to, but they weren't aggressive, and it even happened to me later on that I went with a friend to the cornfield. There was a Russian helicopter flying over us. So apparently they were watching to see if there were any saboteurs, because their information that there was a counter-revolution and I don't know what... So they circled over us a couple of times, and I was really worried, but they didn't do anything and flew away. My mother was so tight-lipped and kept looking out the window at them, at the Russians. She said they were poor things. She felt sorry for them, that maybe she'd bring them something to eat. Otherwise, she was never a communist, never wavered. Even when my father was, she was always against it, but she felt sorry for those soldiers."

"So journalists came to his workplace and instead of supporting him, they asked uncomfortable questions and suspected he was somehow connected to them. He had years of teasing after that, and that's basically where he ended up. So they let him fly. Then he went to court. They were reassigned with about ten other colleagues to work in some office. I have to say, even though it was socialism and we all know what that was like, they won that lawsuit in the end. They couldn't fire them from their jobs as pilots for political reasons. So he went back on the planes, but he stayed actually, they put him, he wasn't a captain after that, they put him as a co-pilot on the 18s."