Prof. PhDr., DrSc. Oldřich Uličný

"Well, the way I lived through it was that I was very involved there. I started there in 1961 and for seven years, up until the arrival, I had built up quite a professional reputation, I really worked very hard on myself. I was trained by our leading linguist, professor Vachek in Prague, there was this professional career ahead of me. I knew that nothing would come of it in terms of promotion, I would still be on my own, but it worked. Then, when the year sixty-eight came, there were really such fools in the faculty leadership, even people with no education. Marxism just, these people didn't have maybe even a secondary school graduation, it shows, moreover, when they didn't want to work manually. A few of us there more or less got together only during those public meetings that started after Dubček's involvement. So we just got involved there, and it turned out that in '68 we were involved too much, but we were also a little bit afraid, and we said what's going to happen. Until Husák came along, who got it all so mixed up that he reportedly saved people from being deported to Russia, because that was really something to be afraid of, if you think about it, the bigger cities were full of their uniforms, there were tanks at the airports. The truth is, we were... Hradec Králové was occupied by the Poles at first, and it was possible to talk to them, although there were also some ugly faces who pulled guns on us, but nothing important happened. We put up posters, held all kinds of meetings, of course it was all for nothing. Only that we discredited ourselves enough to get the party members fired immediately in '69 after Husák came in. Many of them ended up really badly, because doing physical work after fifty is something that a person who had sat at a desk and thought all his life cannot endure. Many died prematurely or went into disability retirement. I managed to get into that factory and there I worked as a translator of technical literature. It was a factory called Závody Vítězného února (Engineering Works), formerly Škodovka. It was founded by the Škoda workers during the First Republic, we mockingly called it 'U vítězného Nora'. It was very pleasant there, but one still was attracted towards the faculty. For example, I always went to the basketball game there. Well, it turned out that a woman comrade who then came to take my place, in that 1972 gradually climbed up the party line in the leadership of the department and was able to order that I couldn't cross the threshold of the faculty, so I couldn't even go to the basketball game."

"When the front was going back - the Germans went first, of course, they were always delayed. I have to say that they did move us out, but fortunately the farmhouse was big, so we had somewhere to move - they took over the main room and the big hall next door, and I remember there were all sorts of transmitters and electronic things in there, it was still Wehrmacht. They behaved themselves, even two of them stayed with my grandmother for maybe 14 days, they were kind of older guys already, Werwolf. So they admired the old lady and talked to her in all sorts of ways. She didn't know a word of German, she thought that German [Němec in Czech, trans.] was for being dumb [němý], so she shouted at them in Czech. She thought that if they were dumb, she must shout at them so that they could hear her a little. They called her Mamushka, it was such a wartime idyll. Then suddenly they disappeared, the SS men came, it was a bit worse. Dad, who could speak German quite well from the town school, made it clear that he couldn't speak German. One of them asked him for a ladder, and my father kept saying he didn't understand. The little soldier found it himself and my father said something very rude in Czech about him. And he suddenly says in Czech: 'Be careful!' He was from Sudetenlands, which was somehow indistinguishable, but I have to say that they behaved decently. They didn't persecute anybody, after all they considered us, Czechs and Moravians, to be better than Poles, Russians and Ukrainians, whose lives they didn't care about. So somehow we survived, and then... Svoboda's soldiers liberated us. They were mostly Slovaks, who were easy to talk to, but there was suddenly an alarm, as the Americans were still flying, so we spent the night in a shelter, in a potato cellar next door. Then we came back, the Svoboda soldiers were gone and with them our father's pocket watch, which he had unwisely left in the cupboard behind the glass. But we were glad that we had been liberated and the watch was not spoken of."