Zdeněk Uhlíř

“My father knew Lieutenant Colonel Kolář, who had served as an officer of the Czechoslovak army before the war and had been in command of the Milovice air base. And when the war began, he ended up in hospital in Vinohrady, and because the Kolařs came from Hostín, they had known my father from his childhood. Because the Gestapo knew that my father was acquainted with him, they presumed that he might participate in the resistance, so they didn’t just interrogate Lieutenant Colonel Kolář, who was in hospital, but my father as well. But no one told anything on anyone, so they couldn’t prove they were participating in any kind of resistance, and my father was released based on that. But Lieutenant Colonel Kolář never made it out of that hospital.”

“We travelled with the Youth Travel Agency to the youth camp, where representatives of the youths from Socialist countries were gathered. We played football, went to parties, there were various competitions, football, volleyball, tennis, but there were also art contests, one of which made a special impression on me. We were supposed to make a model of something out of sand, whatever we wanted to, and we were already slightly infected by the democracy in the press, and we knew that the Soviet forces weren’t willing to pull out of the Czech Republic after the [military] exercise. And so we built a model of Prague Castle by the sea and we planted a Czechoslovak flag there and built sand tanks around it. When the organisers of the competition arrived, they immediately stopped the contest and kicked everything to bits. That was an indication that something was going to happen and that anger and hatred against what was going at home was fermenting in the Soviet nations.”