Natálie Mikušková

"I had a two-year-old child at the time and my husband's mother came running to us and hurriedly told us to go buy bread. But it was nowhere to be found. There is a little pond in Broumov and my sister and her family were there at that time. It was August, it was warm. So my husband took a detour, through the fields, so that he wouldn't meet the tanks, so he went there to take them home, because it was getting close. So just fear, chaos. We didn't know what was going on in Broumov. Just the big politics was going on in Prague at that time."

"There were Hungarians there before, who did not treat the population very well. They even left a charge in that oven where they baked bread. And my brother as a little kid went to play there and dug it up and my mother discovered it before it flooded, otherwise they would have been blown up."

"Dad was with Svoboda's army, but you know how the Svoboda men were treated there, badly, they were threatened with ending up in the gulag, not to be glorified, it was bad. Dad reached the Republic with Svoboda's army. He was wounded in the Dukla pass and got to the hospital."

"We had a cow, she fed us, and there was a saltbush growing, it all boiled, and some soups, so we survived. I was saved by the help that came from America. I had meningitis at the age of two, and penicillin from the West, which somehow got there, helped me."

"In the 1960s, my father got the idea to visit his friend Ludvík Svoboda in Prague. He took me with him. He was the Minister of the Interior at the time, he shook my hand, he gave me priority at the door as a thirteen-year-old girl, and I was absolutely ecstatic. Ludvík Svoboda asked: 'So what do you want, Vasil?´, my father was Vasil. "What do you need? His comrades in arms came to see him regularly and everyone needed something."