Miroslav Vít

"And what I will never forgive them for - 1969. They always talk about 1968, and 1969 in Liberec was far worse shit. It was Czechs against Czechs. We came to see my parents and I learned from my mother - she was on crutches and had gone to lay a flower at the Liberec City Hall - how they shot about seven people there. And while she was there, suddenly the police raided the square and beat everyone who was there with truncheons. They wanted to beat my mother too, even though she was on crutches, but fortunately they dragged her to a shop, a jewellery shop, and there she survived the worst misery. We arrived in the afternoon, and the whole town was already besieged. The first cordon was the soldiers, they had brought them from Žatec, and sometime during the night they woke them up, the second cordon was the People's Militia, and the third cordon was the police. And I know that at night, it was already dark, there was cutting, no matter who it was, we were fighting with the police. And then towards the end, the policemen were shooting flares from Pražská Street. They were shooting flares at people! They were shooting it into the pavement, it bounced and flew among the people. Everyone knew it could kill. That's... Everybody knows that. I can't forgive that the Czechs were actually against the Czechs back then. That was the worst shit that could have happened. And the worst shit was that they never punished anyone from the People's Militia. Everybody got away with it. And they were pretty bad bastards."

"I was lucky enough to experience - they called it 'the golden age of tramping in the Jizera Mountains'. It was from 1960, until about 1964, when we went to the army. That was our strongest year. We were divided into North and South, the Southerners, they were such scum, they used to go to Turnovská, mainly to pubs, they always got drunk somewhere and made a mess. We were the right bunch that went to Fort Adamson, that's actually the Black Nisa. We only knew each other by name. You know, there was Kulhavej Áda, Tanvalskej Tom, Kenny, Špacír and all that. We didn't know anybody's name. We didn't care."