Petr Šimr

We went there together and experienced the concert together. Everything was great, the music excellent. Hallyday was someone, and his band played one rock'n'roll hit after another and also other great songs. It was disturbed for a while by people who probably didn't get tickets, so they upset the fence up in the woods and ran across the grove from behind. This can also be seen in the film that the STBs were shooting there at the time. I have the film at home, I got it from the editors from Czech Television when they were filming my memories of the concert. That was the only problem on the part of the audience. They thought the "manickas" would do something there. I don't know what they imagined we'd do there when we only came there for that rock'n'roll. So they started it themselves. They provoked them to throw cups of sand and grass on the stage at the end of the concert. Hallyday left the stage. The concert ended. I was there together with the girls. I saw that something I would rather not be part of was about to happen. We left and stopped at U Jezírka on the terrace for a beer and we sat there for a very long time, when people started coming from the direction of Lidové sady, some covered in dirt, mud, other smeared with clay. So we learned there was a rumble. It is said that some participants wanted to wait at the exit for Hallyday and greet him up personally. Unfortunately, the cops there, I don't know how, provoked a big fight and some hot heads, which of course were among the fans of this music, started to fight with them. Maybe [people] overturned a police car there, or set a bench on fire.”

The roar of the plane woke me up. It was weird to me, I thought it wasn't our planes. I had those sounds under my skin for two years at the airport. The training dolphins that flew there, and sometimes the MiGs (…) I think the twenty-one, had a completely different sound. So I arranged to go to breakfast, the others stayed down. Nobody anywhere. I go and suddenly someone from the window yells at me: 'Hurry up or the Russians will eat your breakfast!' So I said, well that's good. And I saw the plane again. They flew low because they were worried that our training MiGs would fight them. They saw that there was peace, they made several flights and disappeared again and there was silence. I went to breakfast, I came back and there was chaos already. The commanders were nowhere, they had a huge meeting at headquarters, and they were arguing about what would happen next. As we later learned. Then we saw the helicopter flying slowly and exploring the terrain, then it landed. There was a road from Zvolen to Banská Bystrica and on that road lay the airport, on the outskirts of the village Sliač there were barracks towards Banská Bystrica. Hron is flowing nearby. Suddenly we see that the helicopter was descending and descending there, then we did not see it, because it descended to a meadow between the road and Hron. Soviet soldiers landed there. The helicopter took off and we waited for what would happen. The bushes spread along the road and the head of a Russian soldier appeared there, looking around, saying something, then they gradually climbed out, there were about five of them. They had mantles for the winter, even though it was August, and they had rifles and no submachine guns. They were people sentenced to be killed first, it was totally the first line, there were always sent people who are no longer counted on if they happen to be shot by the enemy. They started going there, transmitting by walky-talkies. I don't remember how they disappeared. Nothing happened for a long time, and then huge cargo planes arrived in the late afternoon. They landed, went around the runway, stopped, opened the hatch and drove out equipment, cars with trailers, tanks with diesel or gasoline. The soldiers rode, looking for a way to go. Just in front of our barracks, they found an entrance from the meadow on the road useful. Then it was written directly in the Czech newspapers that it was an air bridge from Moscow to Sliač. Figuratively from Moscow, just somewhere in Russia. We saw the whole afternoon all the way until the evening and the next day in the afternoon, it took almost 24 hours for the planes to fly in and bring the equipment that continued inland. ”

"I got off at Potsdamer Platz and visited the lookout point, where people came by bus, there were buffets, there was a huge attraction from that place. From a vantage point built of scaffold tubes, they peered over the wall to the east side. There was nothing there. It was an empty space, if someone wanted to go to the West, they would definitely not run over it, it was big. It was guarded. I walked along the wall, took pictures, met people when I reached Checkpoint Charlie. I didn't know what it was. That this is where American and Russian tanks once faced each other. There was also a museum of crossings to the capitalist side, there was also a piece of balloon and a platform with propane bombs, which the Czech used to cross the border into West Germany. I no longer remember the details. There were carts in which people exported soil as they dug under the wall. In a hole in the tunnel, they pulled it and dumped it on the other side. It was a powerful experience. "-" Did you or some of the actors think you would stay there? "-" I've been thinking about it, but only for a moment. I realized: You idiot, you have a wife at home, you have a son, a mom, a brother. At that time, I was already aware that the family was suffering when someone ran away. That was one thing. And the second thing was that I didn't have the courage to stay there. It was a combination of responsibility and also - I'm not ashamed to admit - of fear that I came back. "

My parents met there at a party in Dresden, my father was Czech and he worked there as an arranger and my mother was, now I don't even know how did she make a living when they met ... "-" Was it after the war? "-" It was during the war. The problem arose when they were married in 1944, at the end of the war, and their mother was immediately invited as a part of total deployment to work at a bomb factory. My father continued with his life. They lived on Nürnberger Strasse, where a fatal bombing raid in 1945 destroyed their homes, and their house was hit directly. They couldn't live there anymore. "-" How did they survive the bombing? Were they in hiding? ”-“ I think there were cellars right in their house and they went there, and they were even there when the house hit. According to my mother, my father almost lost his eyesight there due to the dust falling into his eyes. It was very ugly. My mother had to take him there when he got out of the basement because he couldn't see. I don't know if he was at the doctor's. But they experienced a terrible air raid and fires there, when whole Dresden were burning."