Mgr. Václav Majer

"And the last thing I remember about the transport is that my mother said, 'Look, there's a prisoner's uniform behind the house, God forbid you touch it, but set it on fire.' I had some alcohol. 'And use a stick to help it burn.' Because, especially the barracks around the station were frequented by prisoners who managed to escape from the transport. Where it came from, I didn't know much about it, I just got this task. But because I was given the task of burning it, I burned it. Today I would think to look at the red triangle that was on it, so I could at least see where the person was from who managed to get a civilian suit here and disappear from the transport. One of our neighbors, the Dědič family, also managee to change clothes of one of the transported people, and I know that Mr. Dědič walked by us and accompanied him to the ferry. He led a Polish man and took him to the ferry and said, 'Poland is towards this direction.' He left him there and went home."

"From the ferry, the Klecany ferry, they were leading, I guess it could have been a hundred or more, maybe, captured Germans. And they took them to the Sokol playground, up to the Sokol Hall in Roztoky. There they sat them down on the field and took them one by one and picked out the SS men. And years later, a man from Beroun came to see me, and a colleague from the town hall came with him and asked me if I could find a place in the Roztoky grove where there were some German graves. And he was from the organization that was searching for German war graves. Then they exhumed the remains and I think there was a cemetery created in Cheb. Or somewhere there. So I said, if I can help him, I went with this man to that grove and there, of course, years later, a tree grows here, disappears there, but we found it all, what he was looking for. But I said, still here, under that hillside, there was an execution where more or less hotheads, without any trial, brought people there and shot them."

"There wasn't much hope. It was a kind of hope in despair, so to speak. Because in our family, we were under the influence of Dad, of course, and this was reflected in his reaction or our reaction, the whole family, in that year of sixty-eight. And at that time, Dad was not so enthusiastic about Dubček. We all felt a certain release, we were happy about it, but because Dad said that communism was not reformable. Either it exists or it doesn´t. And that's why he didn't believe in the enthusiasm that some freedom or something like that could come, and he said that as long as they were there, nothing like that could come here. Release, yes, but some vision of freedom, that's not possible. And then we saw it up to the 1989 what Dubček was able to do. How with blinded eyes people went to him and what he signed afterwards. Normally, a person who doesn't think about it much and hasn't experienced much of it, of course, could have been delighted. But our family didn't share that enthusiasm at all, we behaved according to the conditions that arose, we were happy about it, yes, of course, but I certainly can't say that we saw in it some kind of turn or hope for freedom, for complete freedom."