Ing. Libor Novák

"I'm riding my bike from our house where we lived, where I grew up, I ride five hundred metres, I'm at a right-angle intersection, I turn left, and there's a tank coming at me. I don't know which day after 21 August it was - the second or the third. I don't remember exactly when the occupation troops arrived in Trutnov, what day or what time it was. But at that moment, all the stories my grandmother and grandfather told me about World War II, about the Allied bombing of Neratovice, about which families died where, which German families lost fathers, uncles and brothers because they enlisted in Hitler's troops, I remembered all the death and horrors associated with the state of war. And in that brief moment, they flashed through my mind. Death flashed through my mind. A tank fires, and I cease to exist. I was scared stiff. It affected all my subsequent thinking and feelings, especially the immediate ones - that day, the next day, the next week and, in fact, forever."

"On one side, the Bolsheviks, and the other side, us. There was Pavel Pokorný, Petr Vyhnálek, Aleš Bouda, I think Radek Langhammer, Vilém Čermák, as far as I can roughly remember, the Bolsheviks, including the party chairwoman. There were discussions. What were our demands - we had them in writing - and they said something about it. For me, it was all so grey. I didn't speak the Bolshevik vocabulary, and I didn't want to speak it. The Bolshevik chairwoman then said they had the following conditions for further negotiations. It doesn't matter whether it was before or after she presented them - I thought that we needed to give some framework to the debate. I stood up, I banged the table, and I told her that if she hadn't realised it yet, the negotiations were going a little differently, that we were the ones who were setting the conditions for future events. It livened up our meeting, then it was closed. People were waiting for us in the square, which was a short walk from where we were meeting, at the party secretariat. We came there, and they spontaneously told me, 'Tell me what was going on there.' Probably because, as a blunt engineer, I like to shoot myself in the foot, I started with structured thinking and a strong voice. I climbed the fountain and – with my irony – imitated Klement Gottwald, who had just returned from the castle. I said the meeting could be described very simply and succinctly: 'It was like we talked about the goat, and they talked about the cart.' I guess that's when I really became a public figure of the time."