Professor, Ing., CSc. Jiří Němeček

"We didn't want to call the demonstration to any place - for example, in front of the town hall - because it would probably have been possible to disperse it quickly. So they chose this interesting way of protesting, where they all put on these paper clothes and wrote slogans on them that expressed their protest. We walked in a long procession through the whole town, and we knew that if someone ran out on us we had the opportunity to rip the clothes, crumple them up, throw them away and run away. Kind of like the time I mentioned that August 21, 1969, when everyone was running. They fired tear gas at us right away, smashed half of Pražská Street, the shop windows downstairs were of course smashed to smithereens. All this was blamed by the propaganda of the time on a justified boycott, but of course wrong from their point of view, and the resistance of capitalist renegades - in the jargon they used then. But I think the action was successful, and at the time, going back to the demonstration, most people saw that the young people were willing to give something to it and to take risks. It was a bit of a call to not give up and not to resign, but in the end the regime, the organized violence, won over the will of the nation."

"I remember the great enthusiasm and the many stories of people saying that the Czech nation is not an exceptional nation - I think in some ways the Czechs are amazing. I would give one example. When the Russians came here, Liberec was full of tanks - along today's Sokolská Street from the bottom to the top. And we were standing in front of a building that wasn't there at the time, in front of the Ambiente restaurant, and there were a lot of vehicles, tanks, trucks, and everything was full of people trying to explain to the Russian soldiers what was going on, why they were coming here, and so on. But nobody was vulgar to them, people were really trying to convince them that they had come somewhere where nobody wanted them to come. And again, it's an amazing parallel to what's happening in Ukraine at the moment, especially in the south - now occupied. And imagine that some people took a box of ammunition off a tank and carried it away. The crowd descended on them, saying, 'Don't be silly, they will accuse these soldiers of losing their ammunition and shoot them!' And the crowd drove them to give the ammunition back to the occupiers. And I think this is an incredible example of how exceptional the Czechs are. And I think it would be hard to find a nation that could boast something like that - that they have retained their humanity even in the most difficult times of Czech history."