Mgr. Václav Keprt

"Not the police, but it also happened that there were signals that maybe we had somehow dispersed earlier or, we were really very cautious, we were coming from different directions, and one by one, two by two, and with a time gap, that it wasn't like we were herded in like a herd and, 'František, hello, we're here and we're going to do conspiratorial activities.' We kept at the ground, we knew what was at stake, nobody wants to put themselves at unnecessary risk, some kind of bullying, being thrown out of school, out of a job, etc. So, we were careful, but we were not passive."

"Of course, it was in us, it was in us at the end of the year sixty-eight, after all, it was all at the same time, so, yes, I remember being with Dad when he was writing: 'For Dubček, for freedom, no water for the occupiers' and slogans like that. So, we lived through all those fears with my parents, my mother would pack our backpacks, put dried bread in them, and I remember that when the planes were flying over us. The fear, the tanks driving past our house, the house shaking and the road almost ploughed, we could see that something really fundamental was happening, something fatal, and now of course, you couldn't hide that fear and not see it in my parents who had the experience of war, we were really sitting at home, praying and preparing for the fact that we might have to run away from the house."

"And otherwise, I had it so easy at home. Our daddy was tried for subverting the republic, I remember the fear we had that he was going to go to prison and what we were going to do, what we were going to eat, and we lived through it, both my mother and him lost their jobs, and then of course we listened to Free Europe, Voice of America, and I came home from school, I shared, what they had poured into our heads at school, and my dad got mad and immediately gave us a second lesson in what it's really like, and I actually felt this unfreedom, ambivalence that I couldn't even say what I thought freely, that I could behave differently at home, that I could behave differently at school, that I couldn't say what I thought, that I couldn't do what I wanted. So we, fortunately for me and for us, grew up in that upbringing that gave us a mirror of society and immediately told us how it really was and how the regime was cowardly, monstrous, degenerate and cruel."