Ing. Václav Mašek

“I was there just with my wife, without our daughter, the parents were taking care of her. We were there... wandering about Switzerland in car for about a week. The people created a great atmosphere there. They supported us so much that it was unbelievable. One could not experience something like this here. I remember stopping in a rest area because we wanted to eat something. A car came, a man got off and he went right towards us. He looked at the car, saw our registration number and started to talk to us: that we were nice and so on. And he told us: ‘Use guns against them!‘ And he showed us as well. And when he was leaving, we said goodbye as if we had known each other all our lives. We did not know who he was at all. Suddenly, he came back and brought a bag of sweets, some biscuits and - he gave them to us. And he said again: ‘Use guns against them!‘”

“The former totalitarian regime demolished our native home in 1978. The whole area of Braník where the gardeners, who grew vegetables and took it to the markets, were - I remember when I was a young boy and my father took the vegetables to the markets - they damaged the whole area. It was because the road to the Barrandov bridge was supposed to go through the area. They demolished all the houses, moved people to blocks of flats and put them in one-room or two-room flats. I am persuaded, up till today, that it cost my father several years of life. Because he died a year and a half after it. He was used to living in that garden, he worked there and when they put him in a flat in the block of flats in Lhotka I could see that he somehow surrendered. I see it with a kind of melancholy, sometimes when I hear Pavel Bobek singing ‘My native place‘ it still affects me, and I see the house and how they are demolishing it to us. But it is a fact and one had to deal with it.”

“Once when we were going from Strahov they let us go through something that was like a labyrinth of tanks in the Letenský tunnel and they forced us to get off the car. We were four players there. And they forced us to get out and they started to examine the car. But the way of inspecting! He cut the inside padding on that door with a bayonet and poked around in it. At that time, I think that... we took turns in driving for the trainings. I think that it was Kramerius who drove that time. He wanted to say something but the soldiers who were in the tanks just loaded the machine guns. We froze. They threw our sports backpacks out of the car. Then they told us to go. And when we were passing approximately the place where the airlines were, near the Ministry of Industry now, they started to shoot. People started to run away from the pavements and we - there was a... I remember that there was a grocery store. So, we got off the car and we rushed into the store. And we told the manager .... we told him: ‘We will wait here until it stops. They are shooting from the tunnel over the bridge up to the Revoluční street.‘”