Mgr. Zdeněk Mareš

"A certain Karel went to class with me, his father built and ran a pub there, which was taken from him, and he hanged himself in the attic the next day. So we went to first grade and Karel as an orphan. There were a lot of people, who got shaken by the situation similarly. And who did it? It was carried out by people who were appointed to some cooperative board, appointed by the Communist Party or a district committee. And they were people who had nothing, no major assets, they didn't know anything, so they couldn't do anything other than decision-making officials like this. And they laughed at it, because they knew all the people in Votice and: "This guy had money, he has nothing." They were very happy about it. And mostly they were people who worked either as laborers or casual workers, so-called day laborers. They then decided."

“My grandfather had a medical drug store in Votice, he was a self-employed person, and it was taken away from him in the 1950s. Both shops, he had two, and houses, he had three of them. When he found this out, or was told, he had a stroke, became paralyzed, and was basically out of order. So it was, I was just a boy, I was five years old, so I didn't understand what was happening, it was only later that I found out and realized what was actually happening, why the grandfather was in a wheelchair, and since then my relationship with this regime was not very positive one.”

"So we went with the boys in Votice to see how they would arrive. Well, we saw them driving from Jankov in armored tanks, transporters. So we waited, watched them drive, and now some guys started threatening them with their fists, shouting, and a soldier got out of one of those trucks (an armored transporter), pulled out a machine gun and fired a shot. Not into us, deliberately over us. He didn't want to kill us, just scare us. He fired a burst about two meters above us. But even so, we didn't know if he did it on purpose or if he just missed the shot, so we drove into the escarpment like this and waited there for them to pass."