Michal Válek

"Then we were in this big mass cell and they took us one by one. The first time I was there I left, now they put me in there like in those detective stories, shining something like that in my eyes. And they gave me this little album and I was supposed to say if I knew anybody. I was turning the pages like this and there were maybe fifty or sixty pictures. I was like, 'I don't know, I don't know,' and then, boom, bang, I fell backwards. "What did I do?´ And he says: "You don't recognize yourself!´ They put my picture in there, but I didn't count on it and I came to the mass cell like this, swollen, broken. "You didn't recognize yourself, you idiot, did you? I said, 'You couldn't have warned me?'"

"As we were the de facto academic family, of course we didn't have money for a cottage or a house. "Grandma had already worn herself out completely, so we used to go away for summer stays — you know, you’d rent a summer place in the borderlands for three or four weeks. That August, we were staying near the Polish border. It was a small farm right by the road, and it was just me, grandma, and my little brother. Our parents were working — they only had two weeks of vacation a year, so they couldn’t really be involved much. And then, suddenly, in the middle of the night, tanks started rolling by. So grandma turned the transistor radio up full blast. They kept repeating: ‘Remain calm!’ But she was terrified because she knew Mom worked on Wenceslas Square, so she was crazy. There were no phones back then — no mobiles or anything like that — so she had no idea what was happening. The radio kept reporting that there was shooting in Prague and urging people to stay calm. Around the fourth day, dad and mom came to pick us up. They packed up grandma and us kids, put us on a bus, and we headed off — first to Turnov, I think, where we had to transfer. The town square there was filled with tanks. At one point on the way, our bus was stopped because a Russian convoy of tanks was passing. We had to get out of the bus — thankfully, they let us — because someone unexpectedly ran across the street, the tank had to brake, and as it rocked, it bumped into the bus and knocked it into a ditch. We were lucky to be standing in the field. Another bus came later. It took us the whole day to get from that cottage to Turnov. Then on to Prague. And even after we got home, our parents were always away somewhere. We weren’t allowed to look out the windows — because right across from our building was a nursery, and Russian artillery had dug in there."