Milan Bouška

* 1955

  • "My dad bought the TV when the Americans went to the Moon. So, he bought a TV about a day before so we could watch the live broadcast from the Moon, and he said he spent money on a TV so we could watch it at home. He woke me up at three o'clock and we watched the broadcast. It was blurry, it was unbelievable, it was really nice, well. They fed us all with Gagarin, but we knew there were Americans as well, didn't we. As we were in that opposition to the Soviet Union, we were rooting for that America, that's what it was."

  • "Then there was 1969, which was the anniversary of August 21. And the soldiers and the People's Militias occupied Míru Square, the fire trucks came there, it was all paved over. My mother, who was there with us, was telling those soldiers if they were going to shoot at us. They laughed and said no, but it was cool, then the firemen came there and there was pavement everywhere, cat heads they called it. And they swept these people's feet and it went all the way to the Jirchářovi, and the women had their skirts hitched up and some guy was yelling, that we all should to stand in front of the shop windows. So, I stood with my friend and my mother in the window of today's archive, where they used to sell gramophone records."

  • "I joined Pionýr somehow, but in 1968 some students were on a hunger strike in front of Bohemka and there was a basket where they threw the party's membership cards, so I threw my Pioneer membership card there, the next day I took it there with one of my friends, I was thirteen. I have a great experience from 1968, the Russian soldiers moved up, there was a big barracks on Terasa. There were Czech soldiers there, a kind of residual company, where the Russians moved in, occupied those barracks with Czech soldiers and set up a patrol. I lived two hundred meters away from them, I used to walk past them to school. They were distributing collaborators' news and newspapers there, and once I went to this Russian, because I already knew a little Russian, so I told him that the news was a lie and that I would bring him Rudé právo, at that time it was trying to write some sort of truth. And I immediately told him that he probably couldn't read because he was Russian, and he cried, the soldier, he had a machine gun. I was looking at it like a fool, and I ran home, and I told my dad that I made a Russian cry, and my dad asked me what he said. So, I told him he said he wasn't Russian, he was from Riga. And Dad told me that they were as bad off since the war as we are now. Those were the three Nordic countries that the Russians have occupied since the war like we are now."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Ústí nad Labem, 30.05.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:20:48
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Příběhy regionu - Ústecký kraj
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

He was 13 when, in August 1968, he made the Soviet occupier cry

Milan Bouška (on the right), 1980s
Milan Bouška (on the right), 1980s
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

Milan Bouška was born on 10 May 1955 in Ústí nad Labem, where after finishing primary school he started his apprenticeship as a medical equipment repairer at Strojobal company. According to the witness, almost all the children in the class were children whose parents had problems with the regime. During high school, Milan grew his hair long and sought out the community of so-called „máničky“ who disagreed with the communist regime. After graduation, Milan Bouška joined the Chirana company, where he repaired medical equipment. During the compulsory military service in České Budějovice, he experienced intervention against a helicopter carrying West German people smugglers, who transported East Germans. As part of the underground movement, he attended private concerts and theatre performances in Ústí nad Labem and its surroundings. He was a member of a photo club and took photographs at events, for which he was summoned for police interrogations. On the day Jan Palach burned himself to death in 1969, Milan Bouška was coincidentally also on Wenceslas Square. In 1989, he took part in the demonstrations in Prague on 28 October. The Velvet Revolution took him by surprise, and in the early 1990s he started a business in the repair and maintenance of medical equipment. In May 2022, he was living in Ústí nad Labem.