"When we came back, I walked up to the number four, to our dorm, and there the police were trying to chase us away, to pressure us to go to the dorm. We didn't want to, so it was kind of waves back and forth. I know one policeman in particular, we took his hat. We were throwing it, he kept running between us, we were laughing, and he was saying: 'Boys, stop fooling around, give me back my hat, I'm going to get in trouble.' That was one officer, but another one lost his mind. And I was observing at the time, I don't know if you were there, you go up the stairs, then there's a doorway and then you go in. So, I was standing on the stoop watching these cops running around. All of a sudden, a kid comes flying up the stairs, followed by a cop with a baton. The kid ran into the dorm, inside, and the cop caught up with him there and beat him up. And he was also a student of our electrical faculty, but a year younger."
"I know that once Brezhnev drove through Česká Lípa, we had to go instead of school, but again it was an afternoon class, we had to stand in a line and the convoy of cars drove past. And somebody noticed that Brezhnev was sleeping there. That was perhaps the only thing that was obligatory. We used to go, in those days people were still working on Saturdays, so we used to go on Saturdays for voluntary jobs. And I remember that in the spring we were cleansing, cleaning, raking leaves, broken branches in some park like that. And two months later, bulldozers came and started to destroy the park. They were building a road. So, I vowed I would never go on a job like that again."
"Then I was awakened in the night by a noise and I crawled out of my tent. There was a guy already standing there, too, and we were wondering what the hell the planes were doing. There were planes from the east, those military planes, flying right over the Vrátná dolina. But we didn't know that, it was dark, we only heard it. And we thought maybe the war had started or something. And suddenly a lady came out of the tent, crying and saying: 'The war has started, the Russians have invaded us.' So, we stared and listened to a transistor radio.”
Stanislav Burda was born on 27 February 1945 in Písek. In 1947 his parents went to Česká Lípa as part of the settlement of the border area. They listened to Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. The witness took part in the second national Spartakiad in 1960. He studied electrical engineering at the Czech Technical University in Prague. He had to work with other students in the working class workshop as part of the rapprochement with the working class. He took part in the Strahov events, and at the end of October 1967 there was a spontaneous student demonstration. He lived through the beginning of the August 1968 occupation in Slovakia. A year later, he took part in a rally where Vilém Nový spoke about Palach‘s burning and the so-called cold fire. For pragmatic reasons, he joined the Communist Party in the 1970s. He worked all his life in the power plant in Mělník. In 2022 he lived in his house in Mělník.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
