Arnošt Vlašimský

"The radio, we had shortwave, we used to listen to that sometimes. I then, when I was out of the military service at that school, I built a converter, when the Germans started broadcasting, I can't remember exactly what year it was now, probably 1972, the second programme, they couldn't do that on those TV sets because it was all first to third band, that's how they were made. We didn't have that yet, in Germany they were broadcasting it before us, so we always made something like that, as they say, an aerial, when I was still in the heating plant, so I could make it according to the instructions, so I had the second programme and then the third programme. Those were the only programs, actually."

"On August 21, 1968, I was in the military prison. I was given ten days off for unauthorized abandonment of my garrison, some three days before. So I was just sleeping there. When they came, we were awake because they went past the barracks there to that bridge, it fell through, there were three tanks there, so then the whole of Karlovy Vary went there to watch it. And then, about a week or so later, ten days later, a certain bunch of us, like two groups, were separated and we were transferred to the police, to the Public Security Border Guard on Boží dar. We took turns, one group was always at Klínovec and the other group stayed at Boží dar in the tourist hostel next to the Hotel Praha. There was always one day off and then we were at Klinovec. The one went around the transmitter, there was still a perfect fence, so it was under lockdown, and the other one was around the hotel. We were there until November, when the troops that were there left sometime in the first quarter of that November, and shortly after that, when they left, we went to the barracks as well, the patrolling stopped. A few days after that I went up there with three young soldiers, an electrician, a plumber, a painter, and we were putting up the Finnish houses that the guardhouse was in, it was actually rented from the hotel, so we were putting that together, because then they started to have this radio station, the Western Military District connection, where I was then as commander for the whole second year."