Otto Macák

"I was raised bilingual until I was five years old. My grandmother took care of that, but she died after five years. That's when I stopped speaking German. That was in 1952. In the second grade I perceived a situation where the class teacher said that children from German families were not supposed to speak German in public. This created pressure on everything that was German. I remember going to the store to buy a few rolls, where the clerk approached an old grandmother and told her that if she wanted to buy something from tomorrow, she would have to do it in Czech. It was very absurd for me, but that was the situation."

"This arose because of my political activities. This Jirka Hochman from Reporter came to me and told me that if I had relatives in the West, I should be invited there and I should disappear. Husák made a terribly fiery speech in which he said that the counter-revolution would be swept away like dirt. That means that there will be certain crackdowns and so on. So I went to see my aunt, and she wrote to her brother near Neuss near Düsseldorf, and he sent us an invitation. One thing was crucial for me. Either the whole family or nobody. Because it was common for one person to stay here. The whole family never got an exit permit. But we got it. Because there were officials sitting on passports and visas in Chomutov who had been put there after the beginning of the Prague Spring and knew that they would be expelled again under the normalization. And my name was in the newspapers here, that's what it was."

"Once the convoy stopped, we went to the trucks, to the drivers, for example. The commander of the truck was usually a non-commissioned officer, or rather an officer. Russian was close to us from school, we spoke with them. We got along with most of them, but there were some Mongolians we didn't get along with. There were Estonians who told us that we didn't have to be afraid of them because they didn't have live ammunition, because Russia didn't trust them. They already told us that at the time. I was summoned to the gatehouse from the office, already as chairman of the ROH enterprise committee, that there was a military truck, a tanker, that an officer was there and wanted something from them. So I went there and they wanted drinking water. So I told them that we didn't have drinking water, that we only had industrial water, which was only for the use of the power station. He asked what we were drinking. So I told him that we bring water from home. 'Fucking factory!' was the reply. They turned and left."

"Specifically, he was a Czech, he came to the room with an accordion and asked who was a musician there, who knew something. I didn't say anything because I didn't know anything, that was my luck. But whoever did sign up was to go to the company sergeant, and there they were to pick up a bucket, a brush and a rag. When you drove past the Žatec military airport from Chomutov to Prague, there were three 'T' shaped buildings by the road. In the first one from Chomutov, there were radio operators. That's where I landed. In the middle were the markers, and in the third was the airport staff. There in the corridor they stood with a harmonica. And according to the rhythm, either polka or waltz, they had to scrub with a brush. Or they came who knew how to paint or who knew something artistically. When they signed up, they were allowed to get a bucket and lime and go paint the latrines or the toilets. They even used a brush to clean the urinal troughs."