Ing. Václav Sobotka

"My mother had, you might say, a cousin there [in London], in London, and a cousin from Austria who was a short distance from London. So she contacted them. I decided that I would go there in the summer and try to find out what it was like, and that I would go for about a month, and either it would work out, I could stay for the academic year, or I could come back after a month. And coincidentally, I had bought a train ticket for August 21, but a few days before that, for some other reason, I don't know why, I pushed it back a week or nine days, saying I would go on August 30. And then August 21 came and it seemed that the gate had closed and I wouldn´t be going anywhere, even though it had been arranged. We couldn't imagine that with the whole of Czechoslovakia occupied by the Allied armies that it would be possible to go abroad. I called everything off, but my father and mother came to see me on August 23 or 24 with the news, they came to Lovosice, that the border was open, that it was possible to pass through. But nobody knew if it was valid today, if it would be valid the next day. So I somehow packed everything up in Lovosice from one day to the next. So I went to Prague on the twenty-eighth. On the thirtieth, I got on the train, very anxious to cross the border into West Germany, which we did. I took the train to Paris on the thirty-first of August. I had some friends there. So I was in Paris for about three or four days, where I felt like I was in a completely different world, which I was. Because that West in the spring of 1968... we were in West Germany on some sort of a tour, but that was the only trip. Other than that, no foreign troops in France or anything. And then I took the train across the channel to London, where somebody came up to me at the station and pointed to me and asked if it was me. There was a picture of me. It was the son of one of my mother's cousins who was waiting for me there."

"Everything was fine until the night of August 20-21. Everything seemed fine. I wasn't living in quarters at the time, but with my then partner, who had a small child, so she had a bedsit in Lovosice, where there is a kind of crossing over the railway line when you come from Prague and turn to Teplice. And we had the windows right at that crossing. We woke up in the morning to go to work. And we turned on the wire radio. It was everywhere. We turned it on right away. We heard the first words, I still remember them: '... this sad, muddy morning...' We didn't know what. And now we heard some noise, we opened the window, and we just saw some of these armoured personnel carriers, military vehicles, coming from East Germany towards the interior. Now we... We understood that this is not normal. Then I went to the factory. So everybody was there, nobody was doing anything, just debating. Within an hour, I said I couldn't stay here, I'd go to Prague. I picked myself up and hitchhiked to Prague, somehow to the outskirts of Prague. I walked from Vysočany through the centre of the city. I had a camera, so I took pictures. I walked right through the center of the city, through Old Town Square and Wenceslas Square. My parents lived up in Vinohrady. So I headed towards them. Then up past the radio building. So I was near the radio station at a time when it was probably tense all day. There was even some shooting, so we ran to a side street to hide, to some entrances. Then I got to my parents' place, so I stayed there, then somehow I was getting back to Lovosice the same way. One of my friends, a co-worker from the department, he was an amateur photographer and he took a lot of pictures, so I still... It wasn't terribly late at night, sometime in the evening I went to his place. He took the film from me, developed it over that night and made pictures. The next morning, we put them up in the display case in the gatehouse, which was there, as pictures of what it looked like in Prague on that twenty-first of August."