Josef Plíhal

“It was the twenty-first of August, Wednesday. Mom woke me up, I must have had an afternoon shift because I was in bed in the morning, and mom woke me up. She was crying. And she said we were occupied by the Warsaw Pact. I had already finished the military service, and my mother said: 'Pepík, you have to go to a military unit, we can't give up after all. It's better to die standing than to live on your knees.' That really moved me. So, I went to Karlovy Vary to the nearest unit, my guys were there, recruits, so I went to meet them. Of course, nothing could be done. They told me how it went. The Russians said they came for water, but they had to be unarmed, so they were allowed there. Those officers then left the army, there were purges. My cousin also went, he was a major in Štětí and was fired of the army and demoted to a common soldier, after 1989 he was given back his rank."

"What was it like in the fifties... Parents were worried about us because a pedophile was also found here. I know of one younger boy who was raped, I won't say his name. It was a wilderness here. People made money, there was a ticket system, there was nothing on the market, so the miners went to the pub. There were fights. We went to school in the morning and there was blood on the sidewalk at the public house. But nothing was published. Jáchymov was a forbidden zone. There were checks in Dolní Žďár, if you know about it. When my aunt came here from Prague, my grandmother, my second aunt from Prague, my dad had to get a pass for them. In Dolní Žďár it is in the places under the former Škodovka, there is an industrial zone there. The track from the station from the island led here, the motorcycle drove here, it led over the road, there is also a tunnel in the bend below Jáchymov. So, they stopped the bus and the train and the green one came and checked the documents."