Jiří Skalický

"The teacher Ježek was very strict, but on the other hand, so popular that he taught us such practical things in class. And he was a great gardener. Coincidentally, we had, well my dad and he had quite a large garden next to each other. So I spent much time there as a boy, and all of us children, collecting gooseberries, currants, and our parents talking to each other. It was just such a school of life that you just listened for several hours to what our parents were saying, what was happening and what they were satisfied and dissatisfied with and how it should be. Because under the Communists, unfortunately, everything could not be said publicly. There was some truth, communist truth, and those who had a different opinion could not say it publicly because they were persecuted. He got fired from his job and there were other things. So if he disagreed, one had to remain silent. He could only afford to talk about such, shall I say, forbidden opinions or express his opinions other than those officially presented by the Communists in a closed society."

"I remember it as a boy and I remember it very well. When my father woke me up in the bedroom in the morning, he came and said, it was, I guess, at six o'clock in the morning: 'Get up, the Russians have ambushed us, you'll understand what that means later.' So I just got up, I heard a noise, so strange, the column went, because they came here from all parts to the republic. But specifically here, the location in the direction of Prague was similar to the one in 1945, when they came from Berlin to Prague to liberate on May 9. So they were stationed across the border in Saxony, and on the 20th, sometime around midnight, they simply crossed the border and here the main road - everything was rolling towards Prague. I remember, the road was totally destroyed. Just huge columns of tanks, cars, and soldiers were pulling through Velemín here. That's how I remember people standing here and threatening and turning signs, as if trying to make them disoriented, which of course they weren't, of course they had their maps and so on."