Ing. Josef Smyčka

"Most of the teachers were very convinced, I don't like remembering them. For this. Back when I went to Úsov, we had a teacher called Matyášová and she, I know how shocked I was at the time. We were naughty, like normal, we had a break and we were naughty and she shouted at us and said, 'Can't you behave? Can't you see how sad I am? Our president Zápotocky died.' What year was it, I'm between fifty-five and fifty... three years, seven, eight, I don't know in which period, in the spring, in the autumn he died. Zápotocký. So that's what stuck in my mind, I wondered how a completely indifferent person to me, how he could cause her such grief that she had to shout at us, that we should be quiet because of that."

"So he said we're going to the demonstration. We took the train to Bern, we were in that area around Bern, between Freiburg. [...] And in Bern we were watching like crazy, because we knew it maybe only from TV. A real demonstration. And they were chanting in front of this Russian embassy, it was a palace [...] but then Molotov cocktails started flying, real ones, not only on TV where we had seen it, it was all young people, and there in front of the embassy a cordon of Swiss police who have to protect it. And now the Molotov cocktails were flying at those policemen. Of course, as one or two flew in, the siren went off and they pulled out water cannons from somewhere and the first people, it started backing up, this crowd of these young people, and we started backing up with them. And then we saw, there's two local Swiss climbing the opposite palace. There was a tree in the corner, and you could climb up that tree to that first eaves and to that shelter, to that porch, and from that you could, through a kind of a gully, we climbed all the way to the top of that two- or three-story building. And the locals, they had already, by the time we had climbed up there, the siren had just sounded and the gases had been set off. They had gas masks on and people started crying, even us at the top. We were saying to ourselves that if we climbed to the top, we had to keep it down to make it work, we'd be fine there. And it was, we were crying up there too. And now this one Swiss guy was there tearing the roof tiles away and he wanted to throw it at the cops because they had pushed the crowd out and they were already below us. So we, and the others, and us told him: "Don't be silly, that water cannon will be aimed at us too, it will wash us away from here." And I, as I hate heights, I couldn't see much in the darkness, and the height around, as you're pumped up with adrenaline, so... So now they cleared it, the cops everywhere, and now we couldn't get down. ' Are we gonna be here till morning or what?' Some Swiss, we climbed over to the other side of the main roof and we climbed down again through a kind of a gully and there was a balcony underneath, as it's usually pushed out, just a little window with a door to the balcony and we went down to the balcony and there was a young lady or girl and we were knocking, and she kept running away, she wouldn't open the door for us, she brought her brother and the local Swiss people talked to her and they let us in, we went through the whole house and they let us go to the other side of the river, there were no more cops there. And there we got to the station and home."