Jiřina Čechová

“The teacher just told us: ‘Children, the inspector is coming to visit. And inspectors are greeted by standing up and raising your right hand.’ We practised it. Of course, there were some words that were supposed to go with it, but that would have gotten the Beskov farmers mad, so he said nothing. The inspector came during the break, we stood up and raised our right hands. But one Honza happened to be at the toilet. He came back, stopped in the doorway, saw the inspector. So he remembered he was to lift his right hand. The usual greeting in Beskov was ‘Praise be to our Lord Jesus Christ’, the children shortened it to ‘Proljechris’. And so Honza greeted with the Nazi salute and Jesus Christ. Both the teacher and the inspector were on the brink of bursting out laughing, the inspector only just held it too. Afterwards, the teacher came round to our place and told Mum and Dad about it. They all laughed their heads off!”

“In the morning of the twenty-first, the paper boy brought a supplement to the newspaper, which stated that Soviet forces were occupying Czechoslovakia. I reckoned it was an advertisement for some film. Then I lost my nerves and started pointing at the article and shouting ‘Das ist nicht Wahrheit! That’s not true!’ But then I bought the newspaper. My colleague and I boarded the first train available, which was also the last train they admitted through the borders - it wasn’t possible to get through after that. I arrived in western Bohemia; we were stopped before Prague by tanks on the road. When we set off to circumvent them through the fields, we were picked up by people who were coming from Prague and was turning round. So the whole bus got to Prague easily enough.”