"I was on duty as an assistant to the airport commander on 20 August. We turned on the radio at 11 pm because there was to be an emergency announcement. They played the Vltava opera melody and then said we were being invaded by Warsaw Pact troops, and told us to wake up the commanders and call the chief of staff and officers. The commander was grumpy and said he'd have me arrested for drinking on duty. He had arranged at the General Staff that there would be no alarm drills because the runways were being rebuilt and concrete poured. No planes took off; we would fly from the factory airfield in Vodochody. We repeated that a driver was already coming to get him and that we were being invated by Warsaw Pact troops."
"Around the 8 or 9 May, the uprising broke out in Nymburk, but the Nazis suppressed it and the SS shot a few people. When the Russians captured them on 9 May, my father witnessed the Russians taking the SS men who were recognised by a man whose son they had killed a day before. My father said that the Russians would cut the SS uniform on the left side with a bayonet, looking for a blood group tattoo. Whoever had the tattoo was shot immediately. The SS donned tattoos under their left arm so they couldn't run away or lie about it."
"My dad was into guns from a young age, he collected them and my grandma couldn't stand it. He bought a small bore rifle one day and kept it in his closet. The Heydrich raids were on, and he forgot about that. A patrol came and searched everything from the attic to the cellar. Fortunately, my grandmother used to bake buns and had a one-liter bottle of rum stood in front of the rifle. When the soldiers saw the rum, they were satisifed and didn't look past it. When they left, they wrapped the rifle and buried it in the garden, and that was that. They were immensely lucky, surviving just because of the buns and the rum."
Josef Karásek was born in Nymburk on 11 February 1944 but spent his childhood in Děčín where his parents moved in May 1945. He began attending primary school in 1950 and enrolled in the grammar school in Děčín eight years later. Graduating in 1962, he went to study at the Faculty of Chemistry in Ústí nad Labem. Following his graduation ceremony in 1967, he enlisted for a one-year military service at the airport in Prague-Kbely where he witnessed the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops on 21 August 1968. Released back to civilian life at the end of August 1968, he got a job as a chemistry teacher at a primary school in Děčín. In 1976-1978, he improved his education studying Civics at the Faculty of Education in Ústí nad Labem where he worked as an assistant professor from September 1978. At the same time he taught chemistry at the Secondary School of Economics in Děčín. As part of his further education, he received a scholarship from the university in Leipzig, GDR in the 1980s where he spent a semester studying German history of the 19th and 20th centuries. At the time of filming (2023), Josef Karásek lived in Liberec.
