“My colleagues at the department warned me that Russians would raid Prague; they knew already. Still, I said, I’m going to Prague and shoot if necessary. Well, that was ridiculous. But I went to Prague and witnessed the arrival of the Russians. We were in a friend’s cottage in South Bohemia, talking late into the night, and then in the morning, he knocked on the door and said: ‘The Russians are here!’ My wife and I went to Prague and saw the Russian columns. We walked through Prague all day, spoke to Russian soldiers, and we noticed signs of the Czech sense of humour. Restaurant menus offered gems such as Brezhnev’s Kidneys, Kosygin Brains and so on. You know, the typical Czech black sense of humour! We saw and witnessed the Russian presence in Prague. They said they didn’t know why they were there: ‘I don’t know. I want to go home.’ Luckily, there was no shooting, I guess. It would be a horrendous massacre otherwise. It turned out well overall. We had to endure living with them for 20 more years; that was very, very onerous. But we lived to see 1989, and my children were in that march that walked from Albertov. Both my son and my daughter got beaten up quite hard, but it has all worked out in the end. The revolution came.”
“We had to come to the train station in the evening on the 15th day, and there was a train made of cattle wagons. They put in, 40 persons per wagon. There was nothing to sit on, so we sat on the floor and went to Brno all night long. We arrived in the morning and I was looking at Brno’s Petrov church in amazement. I lived in a village and had never seen a city as big as Brno before. I liked that, and I loved sightseeing in Brno afterwards. From the train station, they drove us to Šlapanice, a village east of Brno. The Russians were expected to come from that direction, and we were told to dig trenches. Interestingly, we could see Slavkov from there: the battleground where Napoleon had famously won. The name Slavkov – or Austerlitz in French – is written on the Arc de Triomphe. The French are proud of it. So yes, we saw Slavkov. They put us up in a gym in Šlapanice, and gave us straw and sacks. We had to stuff our mattresses and stayed there for several nights. The next day, they divided us into groups of one hundred and marched us to the site. That was about a thirty-minute walk away from Šlapanice. They divided us into smaller teams and assigned about ten metres to each team. We had to dig trenches, two metres deep and a metre and a half wide, to be big enough for men. That’s where we worked hard from nine to about six every day.”
“My dad bought a radio right when the broadcasting started. I would occasionally hear Hitler yelling on the radio, so the threat was already there and the darkness was approaching. On 15 March 1939, I happened to stay at home. I think I was sick, and I was looking out the window at the road from Písek to České Budějovice. Columns of Nazi troops’ vehicles were rolling towards Budějovice, taking hold of the little piece of South Bohemia that was still ‘free’. My father must have been very depressed at the time, but he said nothing. We faced a very unpleasant consequence afterwards. The Nazis must have found a list of the legionnaires, and my father was retired prematurely as a result. He was only 49 at the time, and his pension was ridiculous. That was the start of tough times for the family. Luckily, we were allowed to live in school, but it was difficult. My father was not working, and the municipality allowed us to stay there – out of mercy, so to speak – throughout the war. Dad must have had very hard times, but he never complained and he did his best to make it work, helped others and so on.”
Miroslav Pravda was born in Strakonice on 18 November 1928. He grew up in the village of Sousedovice near Strakonice and then in Semice near Písek. His father Alois Pravda was the head teacher in the schools in both communities and a former Czechoslovak legionnaire. At the beginning of the Nazi occupation, Miroslav Pravda began his studies at the grammar school in Písek, and he left for Brno in the spring of 1945 to dig trenches under total deployment. He succeeded to escape from the total deployment for the Reich before the arrival of the frontline. Following a difficult journey, he arrived in Písek, by then liberated, on 7 May. The demarcation line was situated close to the town, so he encountered both US Army and Red Army soldiers. He completed his high school studies in 1947 and was admitted to study at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. His talent and excellent academic results earned him accommodation in the Hlávka Dormitory, which provided shelter to talented students in need. Following the communist coup, he was expelled from the dormitory due to his refusal to join the communist party. While still a student, he worked at the Academia publishing house as a literary editor, and started teaching French at the Faculty of International Relationships following his graduation. When the Faculty was closed, he went to work at the Faculty of Arts and continued until retirement. He went to the EXPO 58 in Brussels in 1958. Not being a communist party member, he only got the job in the Czechoslovak booth thanks to his extraordinary language skills. In 1967, he was offered a Czech teaching job at the Slavic Languages Department at the university in Aix-en-Provence in France. He joined the CPC at that time. His primary motivation was believing that the existing system could be reformed, and also his permit to leave for France was subject to CPC membership. Having returned to Czechoslovakia in 1971, he was expelled from the party. He left France briefly to see his occupied homeland in August 1968, believing it was possible to oppose the Warsaw Pact armies despite being multiply outnumbered. During his stay in France, Miroslav Pravda was repeatedly approached by the period Czechoslovak counter-intelligence service based on a mistaken assumption that he was collaborating with French secret services. When he returned home, the StB also tried to win him over for collaboration, but he refused. He was living in Prague in 2023.
