Ing. Zdeněk Horák

“Wagons and the carriage. And the sledge carriage remained there. As we were sitting on the wagon, our grandmother, her legs were weak and she wasn’t able to climb up on the wagon, walked by leaning on her crutches. My mom and my two-year-old sister were sitting on the wagon, and Josef Mlčoch, a man from the part of the village where the poor lived, a shoemaker’s son from the family of Leoš Mlčoch, grapped a whip from the wall and swung it around and yelled: ´Get the fuck out!´ I still remember this and I told him this. He has been dead for some twenty or twenty-five years now. I told him about it once in the pub. He stared at me: ´I remember it exactly, you bastard.´ And he died within a month.”

“On Sunday in August 1968, when the tanks were riding around, I and my friend, who had got me a job in the Industrial Construction Company in Brno, were together after a night of partying. I slept in his place the day before the shooting in Prostějov. It happened at the end of Plumlovská Street in Krasice. Around two o’clock we walked to the town and all of a sudden, the Russians were riding through Prostějov and suddenly they began shooting from the town square to the Plumlovská Street. Every tenth round was tracer round, and I had already done my army service, but I have never experienced such fear in my life as when the shots were flying past me. I slammed my body to the ground and I waited until it was over. The shooting went right past me until the tanks passed by. That’s where they shot Langr. (Ladislav Langer – author’s note). And before that, they had shot that woman in front of the door (Marie Říhovská – auth.’s note)”

“They saw that it was hopeless and so they sent father home some time in January. He died as a result of it on April 20, 1953. He died in house No. 11, where we were forced to move. They didn’t even allow us to accompany him on his last journey from our own farm. The funeral basically turned into a peasants’ demonstration. I have photograph from the funeral. An awful lot of people gathered there. And the communists disliked this gathering of so many people, I remember that, I was eight… This Mr. Hruška, who worked at the airport – there were planes flying low over the cemetery so that you couldn’t hear anything. We couldn’t even hear the words of the priest.”