In August 1968, we went for holiday with our children to Frýdlant to parents’. My husband’s parents had a few habits that were not always convenient for me. One of those was that no radio was allowed in the mornings, no television was allowed. TV did not broadcast in the mornings very often at that time. After the breakfast, we wanted to go to a trip with children, to Jablonec to my sister-in-law. The children dressed up for the trip, we were leaving the house and the neighbour, we knew him really well, went out of his house just across the Strmá Street and he asked where we were going. I greeted him and answered somewhat naïvely: ‚We’re going to the train station, Mr. Kubát.’ He replied, ‘Don’t go to the railway station, there are no trains today.’ I asked, ‘Why?’ and I thought that he was joking. He had this manner, he liked to annoy people around him. And he says, ‘We’re occupied. I said: ‘Oh my god, by whom, we’re at war with the Germans again? And he said, ‘No, this time, we’re occupied by our friends!’”
„It caused some issues in the family, with my parents, because during some visit, I strictly insisted that it was such a betrayal. My parents were already … by the propaganda claims that horrible things were going on in the spring of 1968 and that we would get into a reverted revolution and the like. So they stopped talking to me because I stood my ground, they stood their ground. It took them two years to accept it but I never really… in a way. Until the ends of their lives, I kept telling myself that they just… They understood it at the end, though, because they found out what had been going around them."
“The tanks had to go through the town square and they needed to do a right angle turn. They couldn’t take any other route to go through the square and then to the iron bridge. There was no other bridge in F, this was the only single one. It was one of the reasons why they absolutely had to ride through the centre of the town. I don’t know whether you can imagine how to drive a tank? My husband served in the tank brigade in Milovice and he said, ‘This is not possible, the tanks cannot make the turn there.’ They did make that turn and a hole about a metre deep was left there because all the cobblestones… A tank, to make a turn, one of the tracks has to remain in place and the other is working. The one which is moving, I don’t know whether it is more powerful. In any case, they took the paving apart in about four metres’ length how they were turning there. It’s on the corner of the Husova street and the square where one turns to the right. To the left, there is a new bridge nowadays and to the right, one had to go across the whole square around the city hall, across the iron bridge and across the square in all its length.”
I had to grow up in one day
Marie Tréglová was born on the 29th October of 1944 in Horní Sloupnice near Litomyšl. She grew up in a family of staunch Communists. She is married and has two children. In 1968, she worked as a clerk at the town council in Kadaň. During the 1968 occupation, she was in F at her husband’s parents. During the normalisation background checks and consequent purges in the1970’s, she voiced her disagreement with the Soviet occupation and she was fired from her job.
