Michal Polman

"So I was nine at the time. I know that my grandmother, my second grandmother, Havel, had Dubcek in the room, Alexander Dubcek, who was the face of the new one. She had Ludvík Svoboda, who was in fact an army general and then a president. And these were the idols of my closest ones. And then I thought to myself, when I was older, that I wanted to meet these idols. Because then it follows my hobby. And I couldn't meet them for a long time, because on the one hand Mr. Dubček is Slovak. Or was, he is gone. And this didn't seem to go well enough. That time was special. And you probably learned, then everything was communist, right. It's hard to deal with it… Someone reconciled, someone didn't reconcile. I say quite openly and I'm not ashamed of it: I had the Communist Party book for four years."

"So that was my military entree. Of course I remember that. Those guys were great. We experienced a lot of interesting things there. And we experienced there… The hardest thing that happened to me there when I was the bulletin board, so the teachers know how Brezhnev died, then Chernenko and others, so it was so fast in the Soviet Union that we didn't even have time to redo the red papers and black papers. And the worst was when the boys from the next unit from Čáslav copied the terrain according to the old map and all four burned down. The oldest was twenty-eight years old. Helicopter leader or pilot. And then when you put the parties side by side there, it smells like you. So it was my army service."