Miroslav Luňák

"I think that right on that twenty-second I was going to work by bus. And we never turned on the radio in the morning at home. And in the bus the men were saying, that they moved in. And so we went to work, and suddenly this loud noise! I was the repairman of a crane, and so we climbed on top of buildings. And so we got on top of the workshop, which is on the way from Homolky. There you can see this dome, the roof, and so we climbed up on footbridges and already the tanks were coming in from Homolky and already standing there aiming at the factory. That was sometime around nine or ten o'clock, I do not know, and the master then said: 'Who wants to can go home.' My friend from Karlov drove a truck, and so he took me with Pepík and we went to Belánka, there we stopped, and they were driving in from the top down. I said to myself: 'That's the Russian army?!' It reminded me of how the Germans were running away from Stalingrad, those dirty uniforms, on top of those old motorcycles... And so it was, they occupied. I remember how one time me and that Pepík were on a motorcycle, they had a cottage in Třemošná, we got a flat tire there, thankfully there was a woman at the house, she was riding on the crane, on the Gigant, and her man also had a motorcycle, and so he fixed it for us. And the Russians stopped there with a truck, a boy was riding by on a bike, and he started insulting them. And well this Russian came at him, took his bike and threw it down from the road. I said: 'You idiot, stay quiet, or they will take you, beat you up, or take you away somewhere!'"

"I was there as an apprentice for the second year. There was this Nosek, a master, every morning a five minute, it was called that, and the whole group was there, there were several groups for the machines, for example fifty people, there he always read from Rudé právo ['Red Law/Justice', a communist state newspaper]. He did not like the Americans, because, as another older man told me, his wife ran away with an American. And he was talking there about how, it was sometime in May, that the Soviet soldiers liked children and so on, and despite that raped people here, of course, and the American soldiers, that they behaved horribly, basically he was insulting them. And I said to myself: 'Wait.' My friend Tonda Rejšek lived above me and had a photo, in which this black man, a soldier, held him in his arms. And I asked him: 'Tonda, please lend it to me.' I told him about what that master was blubbering on about. I came there, he was talking about something again, and I told him: 'Master, come look, how the American soldiers liked us.' He went so red, I thought he would get a heart attack, he jumped at me after it. I told him: 'You have seen it, that is enough for you.' And I hid it."

"We hitchhiked there. This blue carriage with one horse rode there with the post and we jumped up on the step in the back and rode with it across the Kilometrovka and there we jumped off and around the Škoda works we ran down to the 'Husovka'. He knew about us, and so deliberately beckoned the horse at the fifth gate, we always fell down on the street and he had fun from that. Also the baker sometimes took us to those Skvrňany, that was an actual car of a sort, there were these boxes there, and you know, back then the bread, they were these three kilo loaves, what a beautiful aroma that was, and we took off pieces, and he always scolded us, that he would not let us ride anymore."