Ryszard Zwiewka

"I remember the year 1968, even though it was a district town, nothing happened there. The nearest big city where there were some big protests was Poznań. So I know that we, as pupils, fellow pupils, agreed that we will go to Poznań to demonstrate something. But we didn't know basically what it was about. We knew that some show in Warsaw was pulled, it was called in Polish Dziady by Adam Mickiewicz. And it was pulled and banned due to the fact that on at that show, the audience reacted quite strongly to the text of this show, which talked about Russia. And based on that audience's reaction, the show was banned. This caused some resistance in society. In 1968, there was also a battle in the Communist Party between Communists of Jewish origin and of non-Jewish origin. There at that time it happened that the communists decided to expel communists of Jewish origin from the party and also to expel them from Poland. At that time, a lot of people, Poles of Jewish origin, left Poland after 1968. So, less attention was then paid to what happened in Czechoslovakia. But again, since I was eighteen years old at the time, I had friends a little older than me who went to Czechoslovakia together with the Polish army, so at that time we perceived that something was happening in Czechoslovakia. But what resonated more was what was happening here in Poland, and as part of settling accounts, one might say, between communists of Jewish origin and non-Jewish origin."

"You only had to have a train ticket and it was possible to get to Slovakia by train and vice versa. With the fact that it was a big problem that the trains were overcrowded. What about the fact that a person has a ticket when the train that was coming... And I traveled from that Poznań via Katowice to Břeclava and from Břeclava to Bratislava. In Katowice, you changed to a train coming from Warsaw, and the wagons and carriages were full of people. There you had to pay a bribe to the guide or somehow get into the carriage and stop, normally you then traveled to Břeclava. In Břeclav, it was a horror, because there it seemed to me that I was coming to a concentration camp based on what I had seen in the movies. Dogs, dogs barking, doors slamming, soldiers running with rifles along the corridors of the carriages, along the platforms. Those of us who then got off that wagon or that train and went to the train, to the connection to Bratislava, had to pass through a corridor. Around us were soldiers, dogs and so on. Well, that was terrible, you can say. What I experienced in Břeclav at that station when changing from one train to another, I felt like such an outlaw."