Miloslav Douša

"And on August 21, 1968 - it was a holiday - my grandmother came into my bedroom and said, 'Mirek, get up, it's war.' Well, my brother and I went to Prague, and our mom cut out some tricolours for us, so we kept going there until... when we were standing on Palacký Square, there was an armoured transport vehicle by the passageway of a building, and suddenly the Russians started shooting at it, and the plaster started falling on us. That was the last time our parents let us go to Prague, when it started to get dangerous. That was after, it wasn't the 21st. Then the troops were stationed in Háčky, which is here behind Mezouní and near Vysoký Újezd, so we heard them playing a movie in the evening, so they had a camp like that there."

"Well, but that's the way [my grandfather] did it until the year, until the coup, then in '48. And in 1951, they took over him. And because no law allowed to seize somebody who had his seven hectares, they only seized over twenty hectares, the so-called kulaks and so on, so the communists made forced tenures. They always made something up, that the person hadn't handed something over or had done something. And they forced him to take out a lease with the cooperative, with the Joint Agricultural Enterprise. They told him that he could work there, but of course it wasn't his anymore, but they didn't just take his land, they took everything, they took all his livestock, all the crops that he had. And so basically, the man was left completely destitute, so because his father and his mother helped him when they had a farm, so they both had to go to work, and because they were like kulaks, they could only go into heavy industry."