Aurel Lesák

"The tour was always preceded by a very precise check-in. Everything was cleared through customs. Tape recorders, microphones, everything had to be documented. Border checks were rigorous. Crossing the border in those days was a three-hour martyrdom. Everything had to be unpacked from the bus, they checked everything, we had to be there, then packed again, loaded and then off we went. It was very difficult then."

"There were people in the school who founded the SSM [Socialist Youth Union] in 1948. Back then it was called the ČSM [Czechoslovak Youth Union]. Those who didn't join were persecuted. Everyone tried to push it as far away as possible and avoid it as much as possible. The members who were recruiting for the CSM were unsympathetic. They were bankrupt, let's say, locksmiths. They were apprentices who hadn't been successful in school, so they made up for that failure by calling various camps and convincing the normal people there to become the vanguard of the working class."

"They had a policy of avoiding civilian casualties. What they did was that when they discovered a train, somewhere on the flat, on a curve never, they flew the plane over the train, everybody saw it, of course, and the airman put a shot in the air. So it was clear that he was going to shoot. Everybody immediately ran from the train and hid wherever they could. The fighter came back in a big arc and shot at that locomotive, because he knew that people had escaped in the meantime. But it also happened that the Wehrmacht didn't do it, he was in the service car, and so they killed them all. Not only did they destroy the locomotive, but they killed a lot of Germans."

"The resistance was also in the fact that locomotives were being damaged. It wasn't that something broke off. It was that the locomotive had to be taken out of service. It was said that some bearings had to be overhauled. It was easy in those days because they weren't ball bearings. It was '1850' technology, so the bearings had to be poured out in a special... so the locomotive had to be out of service for a long time. Of course the people who organised this were happy about it because they hated the Germans. But behind every one of these people was a German standing. And these were Germans from the Sudetenland who understood Czech perfectly. So there was a great danger that they would overhear some kind of hint. They were very nervous at that time, so they would catch the hints immediately. My father was at the Gestapo several times because of this."

"By leaving Louny, we were kind of abandoned until Christmas. After Christmas we started school in Sedlec. The first thing we had to do was to get a redispero number five and a bottle of black ink. We were given glue and textbooks and we had to glue President Masaryk and Beneš in the textbooks and we blackened the word Czechoslovakia with black ink. That was our school lessons until the end of the school year. The fact that Czechoslovakia was being abolished bothered us in the family circle. My grandfather and aunts talked about it. One of the aunts was a fierce amateur actress. They played theatre, all kinds of patriotic plays. So it was the beginning of the Protectorate, before they started to monitor and ban it. And the theatre, so it was a defiance against that."