Richard Smola

“I went to have a look on the other side, and I made pictures. I got all the way to the end of Huss Avenue. It looks different there now, it used to connect sharply with Skvrňanská Street. At ten o’clock, the Germans started shooting from the tower, and also from the school in Huss Av. When the firing began, quick quick get inside. We crawled into a house somewhere. There was an American tank standing in front of us, the chap in the turret was drinking milk, he had a glass of milk. I can see it like it was today. When they began shooting, he looked around, took the milk and placed it on the turret. He manned the machine gun and let rip at the school. He fired a few rounds and everything went quiet. He picked up the glass and continued drinking.”

“Then came June 1st 1953, the biggest robbery, such thievery - the monetary reform. Father was fresh from prison, so he didn’t take part in any demonstrations of course. There was a revolt in Pilsen on the 1st of June, and Father got a letter on the 2nd of June - an assessment which cancelled the assessment for the flat my parents lived in. He was designated an unreliable person with immediate effect. And the next morning, on the 3rd of June, the trucks drove up and he was moved to Božanov. Božanov is a tiny village in East Bohemia, past Broumov, about a kilometre from the Polish border.”

“They were building the super power plant Felton in Cuba, and I was to be the chief engineer on site - for the construction and installation work. We started from the grass up, so I was interested mostly in the construction work. But we didn’t have as much responsibility there as back home, we were there as chief assemblers; the Cubans were responsible for the schedule - that’s mañana, mañana. Back home we’d build a power plant in a year and a half or so, but there it took five years.”

“ ‘You all have, or the majority of you have political classification E, that means a person politically unreliable.’ It was all clear to us then. Priests went there, there were a lot of university students there, who had been expelled from school after their second or third year. There were Germans even from mixed marriages, who had stayed in Czechoslovakia.”

Mr Smola was on a business trip in Canada during July and the beginning of August 1968. “We had a TV set in our room in Toronto. We’re watching it this one time, and they’re saying something about Czechoslovakia being in danger of being invaded by tanks from the Russian army. We reckoned: That’s a load of rubbish. We came home, and a week later the tanks were here.”