Ing. Josef Tolar

"Those first weeks it was such a unity, one voice and one opinion. Whoever thought otherwise didn't dare to say anything. People walked the streets and borrowed transistor radios back then. We listened to the news all the time, from morning till night. I remember when the Russians came to Borek, I was in Marianské square. Suddenly a police car pulled up there, because there were crowds of people in the streets everywhere: "They are already in Borek!" Those policemen were making informers where the tanks were already standing."

"Coincidentally, students arrived at the brewery at that time. It was back in the school days. In the fifth year this opportunity suddenly presented itself, the school probably had some formal affiliation with the University of London. London students came to visit here and Czech students came to visit there. Of course, the Czechs were, what could have been, fifteen or twenty of us, maybe. Going to England at that time was like going to Mars, something incredible, unimaginable. Nevertheless, I applied, and it was because of the wall newspaper that I was selected, that I could take part in the English trip. Then the following year and the next year, it was just the sixty-eighth year, the English students came here again. They were in Budějovický Budvar just at the time when the Russian tanks were passing by the brewery. They were taking pictures of them. For them it was a cowboy film, just an adventure film, because, after all, 'We are English, nothing can happen to us.' It had an interesting end. I was looking after them, partly because of the turnout at the time and partly because nobody else in the brewery spoke English. So I worked for them there. When they were leaving that night, a guy came up to me and gave me an English passport and said, 'Here's your passport and get out, it's going to be bad here.' I told him, ‘That’s not possible, you look different. And what are you doing here? How will you get back?’ And he replied, ‘Well, I’m English, aren’t I?’ I simply didn’t take the passport, but to this day, I remember how that boy came to me on his own and handed me that English passport."