Karel Kafka

"And I have here, then you can even see how here in the square - I took this picture - how literally the ground was torn up around Ivan, the asphalt, tanks were driving over it. And I have this memory of when that time - I don't know how we found out that somebody wanted to tear down - now they wanted to do it too, when the events with Ukraine, when it started in the spring - they wanted to tear down the statue of the Red Army too. And there was already a rope or some rope around, there was VS truck, a truck, there were too many people. And suddenly from below, from the 'Krajzak', from the theatre, suddenly we heard shooting. In short, some 'Russians' were coming and shooting, fortunately into the air. I was there with my dad, guys, as my dad was fifty, fifty-five years old then, I couldn't catch up with him. We were running down the street home, it was scattered, it was such a fear all of a sudden when that volley came out, and we didn't know where it came from. So that's the memories of the '80s. We don't like to remember it because it wasn't easy for us."

"In Znojmo we experienced it. We met young, I was twenty-two and some other friends, and we had a place called "U Ivana" (At Ivan's) on Vítězství Square. There used to be a shop called U Buchala, now there's a pub there, a restaurant. Across the street there's this place. And there was a grocery store, and there we had a kind of a post, about five, six, maybe more of us. Where they from the upper gymnasium, the lower school didn't exist yet, they used to cycle us some leaflets and news that they learned - and we used to distribute it there. Well, then for those x number of years we absolutely couldn't talk about it, because if it came out, I don't think we would have stayed in education very much."