Josef Kadeřábek

“I witnessed it in Hřensko or in Petrovice on the border crossing, when they brought Germans who had naively tried to cross the border here and our people caught them and handed them back to the East Germans. That’s when I saw the worst brutalities, during these handovers I mean. Our border guards just handed them over but the way the German customs officers of the passport control treated them, I think I’ve never seen such brutality. Národní was nothing compared to this. They hit their eyes with batons, broke arms and just threw those, who had tried to escape and got caught by our border guards, in the cars.”

“We walked past the National Theatre, from there I remember Boris Rösner shouting something from the window. We walked past the National Theatre which had been locked up by someone. When they started hitting people, then suddenly we were looking for places to hide and the giant gate was closed. And we’ve been speculating about who did it back then, that it must have been intentional. I don’t know. We got to Voršilská street and I remember the red berets sliding down on ropes from the tin… there was this huge fence there and they slid down on ropes with these long batons – and they invaded the Národní avenue from the side, which no one had anticipated. And there they thrashed people, I know that Ivan and I jumped at one of them who had been beating a woman with a child with his Polish baton. And I remember we grabbed his legs, kind of pushing him down, so he wouldn’t beat her. Then it got all blurry, it was all chaos.”

“I started gymnasium in 1970 and at that time positions were being changed, so we started with a new principal who… he taught at the Evening University of Marxism-Leninism, he was a confirmed communist, Jiří Netolický was his name. And until then – it was the best gymnasium in Ústí, there were two but this one was higher quality. Until then, Vít Fisher had been the principal, if I remember it correctly. They had simply fired him and this guy of the nomenklatura was put in his place instead. And we had him since the freshman year. So whoever wore jeans or had long hair automatically got punished. And of course, many people… there were kids of doctors, and whoever was the intelligentsia or somehow came from an intelligentsia family, he wouldn’t recommend them for college. He simply wouldn’t. So, he’s really had an impact on many people’s lives.”