Ivo Klempíř

“The tracked a patrol which was returning from there. They followed them for some time and unfortunately, quite close to the wall which is adjacent to the Jewish cemetery, roughly in the area where Franz Kafka’s grave is located, even closer to the Želivského junction, they stopped the patrol. Tomek and Balík thus moved ahead of them, and the other two, Straka and Sůva, remained at the back. Balík had the only weapon which worked, a Czechoslovak gun, model seven sixty-five. They walked ahead of them, they pointed the weapons at them and they told them to give them their submachine guns. The soldiers did not want to; there was their commander, corporal Hýbl, and then there were three other soldiers: privates Šmatlava, Szücs and Trepáč. Those two, Szücs a Trepáč, were cooperating and they were already taking the submachine guns from their shoulders, and they were eventually punished by several years in prison for this. And our people, Tomek and Balík, wanted to talk to them. Balík told them: ‘Let’s agree on this: when you give us your submachine guns, or even if you don’t give them to us, we will leave as if nothing happened and you will swear that you will not shoot at us.’ The private Šmatlava, a hot-headed Slovak, who was probably slightly dumb as well, immediately started shouting: ‘I took an oath only once, and that was to my country!’ and he grabbed his submachine gun.”

“Eventually they came up with a plan that the Central Committee of the Communist Party, which at that time was located at the beginning of Celetná Street, when you walk from the Powder Tower toward Celetná Street, and on the left-hand side there is a corner building Na Příkopě, and immediately behind it there is the cinema Sevastopol. The entrance to the Communist Party headquarters was on the corner of the building. They climbed up through the Sevastopol building. The guys then went to see it upstairs, while I was somewhere by the entrance, watching in case somebody would come and see us there. They discovered that there were some ventilation shafts. They were not chimneys, but ventilation shafts, and they reached from the roof of the building of the Central Committee of the Communist Party down to the individual floors. They discovered this, but nothing else. Then it was necessary to find out on which floors and it was located and the layout, which was quite a problem. They should have somehow observed how often they were meeting there, when there is the greatest number of people, and in which room they were. We came up with a crazy plan, which was feasible, but it would have to be done in a lot more professional way by some intelligence agency or by some long-term surveillance and monitoring of what happens in the building. What we were supposed to do was that we were to use a wire or some strings, we have not quite thought about it yet, it was my task together with Balík, and to lower some cartridges or explosives to the correct floors and through these shafts. It was possible to obtain these explosives by dismantling grenades and use them to create one large trinitrotoluene explosive, which – as Tonar believes – would certainly be strong enough to break down a wall and do quite a mess there.”