Petr Bruner

"We were just going to this religion until the seventies or seventy-one came along - that kind of rigid normalization - and suddenly it started to be declared that we were religionists. I have attached a document of a letter that, my mother took courage and wrote to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Comrade Husák, a letter on this subject, a decent letter, a courageous letter. Of course Husák didn't reply, some official replied to her that basically the teacher, the headmaster, who called us pan-Beatles, that we would be dragged into the assessment and that we wouldn't be able to study, for example, that it wasn't true, that this was not the way the development in our society was going, however, then it became a reality."

"I know that the arrival of the American army created great merriment among the people because there was a band, so the Americans and the Czechs immediately started making music. They stayed there for a few days and a friendship developed. Even after the war, some of those soldiers still went back there. Of course, there were a lot of unhappy stories there, for example, a Russian partisan, a liaison officer, lost his life there and was supposed to meet the American army somewhere in Srni when Patton's army crossed the border. But he was murdered. As we read on his tombstone to this day, he was killed fighting German invaders, which of course was not true. As my grandmother told me, he was killed by the locals because he was carrying American dollars. He could speak English, he was ready to meet the American First Division, which went in somewhere around Strážov and so on. But he didn't live to see it."