Josef Kauler

“That was very hard for me of course, especially after that era became known as the Prague Spring and we thought that the situation would improve and that the fall of Communists was inevitable. Unfortunately this new era came and it was all over. We resisted for a while, wrote things on all sorts of gates and fences, for the Soviet soldiers to go away. A song was created: “Go home Ivan! Natasha is waiting for you…” The whole nation was singing it. And I even wrote on my car, which obviously wasn’t like those you get nowadays, I wrote on the door: “Lenin, wake up and take those tovarishes of yours with you!” ”

“I started going to school in 1940, by that time we had already been occupied by the Germans so we were the Protecorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The Germans would investigate which Czech nationals married a German national and to these married couples the German authorities suggested that they should join the Germans. Which happened in many cases and their children then either went to separate German schools or stayed in Mšena and went to school with us. It depended on each person how they dealt with it and it also depended on the school children who were differentiated like that how they behaved. Mostly they acted normally, like old friends. But there were also those who really became germanised, and we were sometimes scared of those.”