Milan Jaroš

"So [my aunt] told me that there is a small park next to the Children's House and in it comrades meet with students, with people, that there are public forums, comrades answering various questions. And that maybe I should go there. I didn't hesitate and I went there in the evening and I stayed there until midnight. There were taxi drivers standing there. And an announcement came that there was going to be latest, some extraordinary news. The radio announced it. And then we heard that we were being occupied by the Warsaw Pact troops and that somehow we were not supposed to resist and so on. This was around midnight, so the taxi drivers said, 'You know what, get in the car and let's find out what's going on.' Two taxi drivers said, 'We'll give you a ride, normally for free.' One had a Volga, the other had a dark, black [Tatra] 603, and we went to the radio station. At the radio station we didn't learn anything. So we [said we would] go to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. We met Smrkovský there, and he said, 'What can we do?' He was just helpless, you could see it in him. Then there was Císař, I think, who said, 'I'm going to sleep. Because what can we do? We can´t do anything.‘ We were saying, they're all helpless here, so we were talking, especially the older ones, I was still a young boy, that we would wake up Prague. And at five o'clock the march against the occupation will start."

"When I was a kid, when I was about ten years old or older, after the year 1960, I learned from various farmers, from my dad, from my friend's grandparents, how it was in the village when collectivization happened, when they confiscated property. Cows, machinery, sometimes bigger stables or even bigger farms. They took them, they drove the farmers away, and that's how they were telling me the story. The men were furious, some were drinking, and the women were crying on the doorstep. Because they couldn't do anything. How do you defend yourself against such violence?"