Petr Jauker

"The Radio in České Budějovice broadcast, saying that Soviet tanks were passing by and wanted to cancel its broadcasts, and he called the citizens for help. So we said that we must not be absent. Again I got on my motorcycle with Standa and we rode to the park next to the army barracks, and I parked my motorcycle there, and there was a group of about fifty people standing in front of the radio. We always saw that on Dukelská... This tank was passing through Dukelská, turned around at the end of the Mánesova intersection and drove slowly back again, and they were looking around the barracks where the sign 'Czechoslovak Radio' was. Someone said: 'We have to take that sign down!' So I immediately ran to the motorcycle, and in the front frame behind the engine I had a screwdriver that my father had given me, and it was a screwdriver that was part of a KDF Wehrmacht veteran car, German-made. I used to carry the screwdriver there because the screws on the aluminum cover of the motorcycle were loosening and I had to tighten them after a long ride. So with the screwdriver I ran over to the sign, unscrewed it, and we buried it in a pile of sand that was next to the house. Some guys came running from somewhere and brought a sign that had been ripped out with dowels and it said 'Kindergarten' on it. I screwed that sign in with just two screws, so the radio station became a kindergarten. But we were further concerned, and there was a tin shed next to it where the bricklayers had bags and wheelbarrows, so the crowd of people, there were over a hundred of us already, so we took that tin shed and we moved it in front of that radio building and put it right at that entrance, so you couldn't even go in there with that shed there. But the tank was driving around and kept looking..."

"So we drove to Suchý Vrbný, where there was another self-propelled gun, standing next to a convenience store in Suchý Vrbný, opposite the Military Construction Company. There was a gathering of people, women were throwing eggs and stones and so on at the tank. Boys were writing on it with chalk or lime the words 'Idite domoy' and so on. I stopped there with a friend and we watched it. Suddenly, our training headteacher, Mr. Červený, rode up on his bicycle. He was a very brave man, he had a big pot on his carrier, he leaned the bike against the tank, took the pot, climbed up on the tracks and banged on it. There the hatch opened and out of it peeped a tearful sixty-something gray-haired gentleman with glasses and Mr. Červený handed him the pot and said in Russian that it was supreme, warm soup. The gentleman thanked him, the commander of the tank, and he says, 'You know, I'm a teacher at grammar school and they came for me in class and put me in the tank, I didn't want to come here.' The women stopped throwing the eggs, stopped screaming and it all went quiet. I must add that for this activity, for handing soup to the commander of the Soviet tank, Mr. Červený was then expelled from the party and from his job because I met him later in the heating plant where he was repairing heavy machinery and the arm of one of the excavators crushed him and he died."

"It was not a pleasant feeling. Then I stopped feeling like a hero because we didn't know what was coming. Suddenly, on the horizon, behind a kind of hill that we couldn't see, a Russian GAZ vehicle appeared, coming within about two hundred meters of us. A Russian officer got out of it, took his binoculars and looked at us through the telescope. Then the driver handed him a radio handset and he reported somewhere. In a moment we saw him nod his head, get into the GAZ and drive off. Suddenly, a larger Russian off-road vehicle - it's called a UAZ - comes after him. And behind it, a little one, about two tons... and there were, I don't know, twenty Mongolian soldiers crammed in it, and they had slanting eyes, and they were wearing fur hats, in the heat, and they were holding machine guns and bayonets, and they were sleeping on the car. They came to us about a hundred meters away, and that was probably the commander of the whole tank column, he got out again, took the binoculars, looked at us from all sides, then made another phone call, then got back in the UAZ, turned around, the Mongols with the truck too, and disappeared over the horizon. For about half an hour nothing was happenig, we were shaking with fear, what would happen, and one of us had a bicycle, so he got on it and went to look over the hill. He was there for about five minutes, then he comes back down that hill waving his arms at us and smiling. So we said, that's good. He came over and said they put the tanks in a circle behind that hill, put vehicles between them, and they're putting up tents and making camp there. So we started screaming with joy because we managed to keep them, the Soviet troops, out of České Budějovice..."

"... And the radio announced that the patriots of České Budějovice had decided to stop the Soviet troops and not let them into České Budějovice. And the event was to take place at Borek. Because I was such an adventurous character, I took my friend, that was a boxer Standa, who used to box with an old Němec, and we got on a motorcycle and we came to Borek. There were already about fifty people there and they were arguing about how we were going to do it and what we were going to do. So I hid the motorcycle, there was some tall greenery, in the bushes and we were conferring and suddenly a Zetor 25 tractor comes up the hill from Borek and it's pulling a shit truck behind it, a sump for pumping sludge and so on. When he came to our level, we stopped him, we unhitched the shit-truck, put it on its side and turned it over on the ground, so that the metal tank was in front of us as a kind of protective shield for the barricaders, and now we were wondering what to do next. And we saw in the distance in the field there was a bus trailer that used to be pulled behind a bus because people from the villages couldn't fit on the bus, only then not so many people from the village came, so the cooperative farm bought those buses and had them as a changing room for the women who worked in the fields. We sent the tractor driver to get the bus trailer. He pulled it over and we rolled it over again on its side next to the shit truck. And we sent the tractor driver with two other men into the woods because he knew there were logs stacked somewhere. So he drove around, and every time he brought as many logs as he could dragg down the road. We pushed those logs through the windows of that tow truck, like we were weaving that barricade. More and more people were coming, there were a lot of employees from the agricultural buyout, that was the silo on Strakonicka, the cars always brought them in and then left again, I counted 150 people, we were brave when there were so many of us. Then we found out that there were some gentlemen in half-boots, tie and suit, and they all had cameras on their chests. The gentlemen mingled among us, but we found out that some of them had walkie-talkies, and years later I learned that they were sent by the Chief of Public Security, they were State Security employees. Their job was to monitor us, take pictures and report what we were doing there..."