Jaroslav Krček

“A German solder showed up there and he saw that a bicycle has been left there; he got on the bicycle and wanted to ride away. He apparently wanted to save his life. But he was caught by our neighbours, by the people from the street where we lived. He was beaten, they tore his uniform and handed him over to policemen. I felt sorry for him. When I became an adult, I realised that it was not fair and not correct. When we were five-year-old kids, we even used to play with these soldiers, because they had their training ground there and from time to time they would even give something to us. From my child’s perspective they were thus not enemies. He was a man, a human being. Honestly, who knows who the soldier with the bike was? Perhaps he was a young man who deeply disagreed with what he was doing. He disagreed with the war. Perhaps he had been drafted, just as people are usually drafted into a war like this. And when there are two nations, or even the whole world, waging war against each other, who knows where there is the truth? It is not anywhere, basically. I simply felt so sorry for him; and on top of that, there was our neighbour there, and this woman was handing out pieces of his uniform as trophies. ‘Take it as a keepsake!’ I was proud of my grandpa Dvořák, because he refused to take it.”

“I thus befriended this ensemble and its conductor (Helmut Rilling). At that time, after the Soviet invasion into Czechoslovakia (in November and part of December), he had a seven- week tour in the United States. As a friend, he offered me to play the timpani drums and he would take me with him on the tour if I wanted. I didn’t know how to play the timpani, and so I said yes. I was practicing by drumming on kitchen pots in my summer cabin. In October I went for a rehearsal, and that’s why I’m talking about it: when we crossed the border, I noticed that there was a strange-looking man with me in the train compartment. He was tall, lean, and he had an aquiline nose. This man somehow trusted me, and when the train crossed the border, he reached into his bag and pulled out the book which was called Seven Days in Prague. It was a perfect documentary book about what was happening in Prague during the seven days after the invasion by the Warsaw Pact armies. What happened and where. Who killed whom, who went where, how was the radio occupied. Great reading. I thus read the book, but unfortunately he didn’t give it to me. He told me that he was taking the books out of the country so that people learn what was happening in Prague. He had a full bag of them. It was a samizdat copy with photographs and related documents. There were inscriptions which appeared in Prague streets at that time, e.g. the pun ‘The Russians and ham – both are best eaten cold.’ It was a contemporary documentary about what was happening in Prague during the seven most critical days.”