Jaroslav Novák

"Well, on the way, when he saw a Czechoslovak military car, a local gamekeeper probably honked at us. And when he stops us, he says, 'Boys, over there at the 529 marker,' I think I remember it to this day, that number, because at the time, we were pretty screwed up for quite a few minutes, as I'll go on to say, 'there are some soldiers, they're not ours, they're foreign, you should probably report it to yours. ' Well, so we left it to the beepers that were with us to encode it into some of that code that was over some letters, or I don't know what it was at the time, so they encoded it, they broadcast it, that there are some soldiers, that it's on the 529 mark, which we didn't even know where it was at the moment, but the gamekeeper would certainly explain it to us. Well, we sent it, and now we were waiting to see what would happen. About five minutes later, the reply came, again in code, or maybe ten minutes later. Go there, and find out how many of them are there, what kind of equipment they have, if they're armed, and so forth. Well, that morning, I'll use the word, we literally shit our pants. Out of fear. Because we didn't have anything on us except a screwdriver and a pair of pliers, and this beeping device, nothing at all. So we said, 'They can't prove to us that we didn't go looking for them or didn't go right away.' So we waited another twenty minutes, and then a message came in that canceled this order, and it said, 'Finish your work, and we'll expect you back safe and sound at the unit this afternoon, sometime around four o'clock.'"

"The times were changing, there were background checks, there were such vetting sessions... a rather unpleasant half-hour when I stated this, and I even forced the Bolsheviks that for twenty-five minutes of that half-hour, we talked about why Kubišová and Karel Černoch, couldn't be played because of the Song of My Country, when Matuška was still here, so it wasn't about Matuška. Only at the end, they had to ask me if I agreed with the entry of the troops. Of course, if I had said I didn't agree, God knows how I would have turned out. So everybody agreed, including me."