Milan Drbohlav

„It was hard to call dramatic, not really, but my brother-in-law woke me up at 4 P.M. in the morning on August 21, that one colleague called to immediately turn on our radios and wake up, the Soviets are coming to occupy us. He was a nice man, but liked playing cards so we thought he´d probably had too much to drink and is just kidding. He was alone and without family, so we told them to say we´d turn the radio on in the morning. He said no, you must turn it on now and go to the telephone. So I stood up, went to the phone and he said: ‚The Soviets are occupying us.‘ I was telling myself, they were up in the border, what´d they do here... He lived in the spa promenade so he said: ‚I am watching them from my balcony, they´re rushing through Sadovka, I don’t get what happened up there, but they´re here.‘ Well we could not wait anymore, so we turned on the radio announcing that the parachutes dropped here at midnight and occupied the Prague castle, the central committee of the communist party and the airport, that transport aircrafts landed in Ruzyně and the heavy technique and soldiers are coming from there etc. So we dressed up really fast over our pyjamas and rushed out. The whole streets were full of people and in balconies in their gowns, we heard the screaming and ran along Bezručova Street down to the city centre. There we went to Palačák, and saw the gray monsters there from far away.“

„They were so fussy, they´d not even know where they were. Someone courageous asked them, what they´re doing here, and whether they have any idea about their whereabouts. And they´d not know they´re in Czechoslovakia. They got an order in the morning or at night to cross the borders and it was not the crews, as we then thought, that they were dislocated crews in Germany, but they were from somewhere in the central Russia so the poor boys didn’t have a clue where they were. They thought they may be in Bulgaria or Romania, which was closer... Well all right, that was the end, they said nothing on the radio and television neither of course, as it was already occupied too... So we thought we´d just have to wait and see how it turns out...“