Petr Šída

„And now let me tell you what disappointed me most. In 1969, I was still in hospital and walked with crutches. And when it happened so, I went to have a look at the memorial. So I limped my way to the city hall and I saw the door where I had been shot was covered with a pile of flowers. And suddenly, police and army arrived, surrounded the place, put up a tape. A tractor came, two blokes jumped off, grabbed pitchforks and started loading the flowers on the trailer. I had my crutches and I was standing on the corner where a bookstore used to be and I couldn’t get any closer. I was afraid that should anything happen, I wouldn’t be able to run away from the police. And I saw a horrible thing which I couldn’t understand. When they cleared it up a little bit, so, in that corner where we had been shot, a bloke, such a young guy, maybe two years older than I was, he pulled his trousers down and took a crap at the spot where we had laid after we had been shot.”

“I’d say it like this. You can’t forget. You can’t forget what they did, but I have forgiven. If the man who shot me stood in front of me now, I think I wouldn’t even swear at him. You have to live, and you have to [forgive] the occasional mistake... because it’s hard to live with grievances.”

“Then they loaded me up and wheeled me off there. I was lying on the floor at the reception, when to my horror I saw that some of the people there were covered up, that means, they were dead. I lifted a blanket and saw the boy [Jindřich Kuliš - ed.] that I’d let into the ambulance instead of me. So he was a goner. They checked me, saw the condition I was in, that my legs were shot to bits. They needed to get me to the operation room. But unfortunately, the power was cut, so we couldn’t get upstairs [by lift - trans.]. I was extremely lucky because one of the assistants was a friend of mine whom I’d occasionally go out for a beer with. He and one other took me by the armpits and dragged me up the stairs. They said: ‘Don’t worry, you won’t die, we’ll take care of you.’ And that was the last I remembered. Then I lost consciousness.”

“When the shooting started to slow down, the first ambulances arrived. There was a boy lying next to me, and... they wanted to put me inside and take me away. I told them: ‘No, no, take that boy.’ He was holding his lungs, and there were these eight- to ten-centimetre bubbles coming out from between his fingers. So I told them: ‘He’s much worse off than I am, I’ve only got my legs shot up. Take him.’ They loaded him up, and that very moment a tank nudged into the ambulance, and the situation got tense again. Two boys appeared from the other side, from The Book - there was a shop called The Book on the corner. They scampered up, grabbed me, and dragged me to the cellar entrance [of the town hall - ed.]. But [the Russians - trans.] started firing at them. The town hall was done up with scaffolding, so there were some scaffold pipes stacked on the ground. They put me behind the pipes, so they couldn’t get at me. They themselves ran and hid in the cellar. Unfortunately, one of my feet was sticking out from behind the pipes, so I got hit twice. One shot cut through the middle, the instep, the other went through the tip of my shoe, so it didn’t hurt me.”