Zbyněk Šolc

"Each company had a ritual that promoted a boy who had been in the army for a year to the second year, so he became an old hand. Every company did it differently. Somewhere in the company they did what they called a quill kick, which meant that the guy in question would bend over a table and those who had the right to do it, the old hands, would run up and kick him in the butt and there would be a competition to see how far he could move the table. Only he was tied to the table. That was one way. I know in the pontoon company they used to do it this way, they'd take a paddle and they'd beat the paddle across the bare belly. But can you imagine a drunk, because the superior soldiers took it as an opportunity to get drunk, literally, so can you imagine a grown man hitting a soldier who is tied to his bed across the stomach twelve times in every month? Like, pluck one of those pigeon quills out of him? So there were broken ribs and things like that. Well, and in our company, the specialty was that the soldier would be tied to the bed face down, you could see his naked behind, so the guy was naked, and because we were guys who worked with pliers, like engineers, the pliers would be boiled in the echelon and the meat would be pulled out of the ass."

"In the year eighty-nine, I actually got to the Civic Forum, in quotation marks, by accident, because the neighbours across the street said, 'Have you been to Liberec? There are big demonstrations,' and that was on November 18. We said, 'Well, we heard that something happened in Prague, but we don't know what and so on.' 'Then come with us to Liberec the next day.' Well, I couldn't help thinking: 'Why is there nothing in Jablonec?' And so I went to the front of the Jablonec town hall and there a lady, I know today that it was Libuška Hájková, was talking into a megaphone about what had happened on Národní Street, that students had been beaten up there and that of course no one in their right mind could agree with that. I was there with my disc jockey friend, my colleague Tomáš Černý, and I said: 'Hey, Tomáš, we have a sound system in the garage, so there's no problem. Well, we went to the garage, loaded the equipment, drove to the front of the Jablonec town hall, and there we turned up the sound, so she spoke normally into the microphone through my disco soudn system. And that's how I actually got to the eighty-ninth year, the 17th of November and the Civic Forum."

„I worked in an audiovisual center. It happened to me that such an old man with a cane came there, he came all the way up, we had such a bar there, a kind of a sitting area, so he went all the way up, so I left the office and said: ˏGood day, what would you like?ˊ and he said: ˏMy name is Mrázek.ˊ So I say: ˏOkay, sit down, and what would you like?ˊ He says: ˏI fought in the air battle for Great Britain.ˊ Today, Generála Mrázek street in Jablonec is named after that gentleman. I truly regret that I didn't record it because what he was telling me was absolutely amazing.“

"We learned from our neighbors that something was happening in Liberec, of course we didn't know what it was about. But we didn't go to Liberec, because we learned that there is something in Jablonec as well. So we went in front of the town hall, where we listened to Libuška Hájková as she spoke into the megaphone, she started to read a statement, and at the beginning the anthem was sung. Well, since she was talking into the megaphone, it wasn't very easy to understand her, so my friend Tomáš Černý and I decided to go to my garage. We took out the disco equipment, brought it in front of the town hall, put it on its side like that, and gave Libuška a microphone so that she could be better heard."

"Like every child, we were just running around outside and of course we learned that our republic was occupied, that tanks had arrived. Mom was crying. It must not have been pleasant for those people. As children, we took it more like a game. My brother and I were in the garden, we had wooden rifles and we were waiting for the Russian tanks to arrive, because it was said that they would go through Jablonec. But that didn't happen at all, because people bent the signs or the direction indicators pointing to Jablonec. They got somewhere near Desná or Tanvald, so although we kept waiting, we did not make it."