Ing. Vojtěch Petr

"We spent the whole of August on vacation in the GDR by the sea for three weeks. And when we were returning through Lusatian Serbia, the Serbs told us: 'There's your border, there's a Russian soldier there.' Yet we still did not know what they were intending to tell us. And they were there ready to invade us. In addition, we arrived home on the 20th, we unpacked our things from the car - and at night, we heard planes roaring, huge traffic in the Ruzyně airport, and sometimes at three in the morning my brother, who lived in Suchdol at that time, who was already married, called us on the phone. And he said: 'We are being occupied by the Russians. Can you hear that? What a horror.'"

„On the one hand, the freedom that a person could really say and do what one wanted. Suddenly we could travel, spend holidays anywhere by the sea, visit the mountains in Austria or Italy in winter; this was all impossible before. When I wanted to spend my honeymoon in Yugoslavia in 1976, I had to ask some communist committee at the factory to approve it, and then I had to go to the military administration to get permission. And all this was over with at once. We were suddenly really free.“

"Mom was an only child, they had a farm of about seven hectares in Libun, and dad was one of three children, and they had a farm in Újezd pod Troskami. Of course they took it away. Dad, being a teacher, didn't get affected by that very much, so they let him do it. But his elder brother, who was supposed to take over the farm from his grandfather and run it, so they gave him a hard time; he had to go to a certain engineering factory in Hrádek nad Nisou, he worked there for about five or six years. Then the Bolsheviks or the state had a farm in the White Church, which was going bankrupt - so they remembered him again and pulled him out of the factory and gave him the task of getting it back on its feet. So he did, got together with the people there, introduced pastoralism there. But this is how they played him, so he had a lot of hard time. But I remember, for example, when grandfather Kavan from my mother's side... when he joined the team, of course he had a hard time saying goodbye to all that. They took away his cows. The worst was when they confiscated his horses. The horse has always been a member of the family, always. When he was taking the horse to the United agricultural cooperative stable, he cried much."