Ondřej Schulz

“As I remember, as I can say for sure, as the November 27th general strike had been announced, from 12AM to 2PM I would say, foremen came and insisted that we should reconsider, that we shouldn´t make trouble. Some said, 'Go on boys, let's do it”, others were telling us, 'Listen, don´t be stupid', and some would say, that we really shouldn't play around. And there was a foreman who didn´t teach us and he proclaimed that Lidové Milice (People´s Militias) should have been deployed and they should supress the whole thing. And if they wouldn´t succeed, the army and the police should disperse the students and establish order. But back to the strike, as it supposed to go for two hours, if I am not mistaken, and the foremen told us that it would be bad to strike, that we could just strike after our classes were over. And I think that in the end we wouldn´t strike for two hours but just from 1PM to 2PM, and some of us were so resilient that we kept striking till 3PM.”

“Back then, my brother was doing his mandatory military service. On November 17th, he had been serving in the unit similar to the one our father did. He was with the Railway Corps, unit much like the PTP (Technical auxiliary battalions) which had been disbanded long time ago. And in a quite mysterious manner, he managed to phone home, as we did have a phone, asking our father if he could come, as they were locked up in the barracks. They wouldn´t let them leave. Interesting thing was that they didn´t get Obrana Lidu (Defence of the Nation) newspaper, they wouldn´t get Rudé právo (Red Justice) daily and the TV would just stop working. And they would stop going to work and just stay in a room all the time. They would sleep with their boots on, in a camo suit, the ammunition store would be opened, and in their lockers, they would have guns. And that was just a non-combat railway unit.” – “So they were trying to keep soldiers under control, so they couldn´t participate?” – “But they were sleeping with their boots on. Even the railway corps were on alert. I am just guessing how combat units or even elite units must have looked like. I don´t know, I am just guessing, maybe some historian might say something about this. But interesting was that they would let us in the visiting room. My father spoke to my brother, I was there and so was my mum. My brother would bring maybe ten or fifteen more boys, some of them were from Slovakia, and it´s interesting that there was no political officer or anyone like that, nobody was watching them, so my father explained to them what was happening in Praha. And the boys were really surprised, they had no information for sure. And the important thing is that my brother and the others would leave the unit in secret and they would run through the streets of Pardubice and tear down the leaflets. It was not because they were against that, that they wanted to sabotage the Velvet Revolution, they just wanted to get some information.”