Miroslav Meduna

"Do you remember from the time when tanks came to Pardubice in 1968, the mood of the people and some places they came to?" - "The Poles came to Pardubice, I know exactly that, because I was in the crowd of people who stopped them on the road near Staré Hradiště. Up in the plain, the crowd stopped the armored personnel carriers, about three or four of them. So, the Poles didn't smash us like a cowshed, but they stayed there. They were just looking out of the hatches. We climbed on the transporters and explained to them that everything was different. We reminded them of the events of Poznań. One colleague who was particularly talkative, Jindra Chaga, told them about the Katyn forest, what the Russians had done to them there. After a while, they turned and stayed in the forest. We went to them, there were plenty of us there and we told them, there were some of their politruks (a Political commissar) and they just listened to it. It goes completely differently in the military service, you can't convince any soldier there, it's useless. We were with them for several hours, before they made us leave. Maybe on the second or even the third day they entered Pardubice."

"We also enjoyed the air raids that were there until 1945. We were hiding in the basement. Fortunately, there was no direct hit. It was bombed on Halda, or in Židov, as it is called now. Or it fell near Drozdice. In those cellars, I saw that people were sad, stressed out, even a child could see it. They were sitting, waiting for it to come. When it didn't come, it was good. And then once the bomb exploded quite close, and I said in the silence that was there, 'Boom!' I shouted it a bit and it frightened them so much that women even screamed. My parents silenced me to be quiet. Due to air raids, they hid me in Seč, where I was in Dolní Ves with my grandmother and grandfather. Since it was the beginning of 1945, the Germans were still chasing the partisans there. Usually people seem to think what we were fooling around, when 1945 was over. However, no one knew if it would still be going on for half a year, a whole year or two, no one knew. Even Mrs. Zvířecí (a German neighbor) there was supposed to be the end of the war in a month and she said, 'The leader has something more,' that it would be turned. However, regarding the Seč, where the partisans were being chased there, my grandfather and grandmother and I hid in the cellar, now it's called the pub Pod drnem. There was a crack in that door, the planks didn't fit, there was a gap of an inch wide, and we watched the German soldiers walk across the road. We were waiting that they would find us and do something to us or not do anything. Someone just could have gone crazy, they would say we looked at them badly or aimed, and it's done. I wasn't three years old yet back then, and I felt the fear of the adults as to what would happen."