Miloš Janáček

"In the military service - the army and police were part of the power of the ruling establishment, or the Communist Party - and the political ideology there was enormously infused into the people, forced upon them. You were put into an environment that was part of the power apparatus of the ruling power at the time, which was more or less a puppet power in the power of the Soviet Union. And with that mental attitude of mine, the setting as I've portrayed it here, it was just an ordeal. Around this time, even though I hadn't thought about anything like that before, and I just concentrated on my studies, which I was really interested in, and that was enough for me, and I took these things as necessary evils - the political things that were running on the radio, television, the news, I didn't listen to that at all, these things. You could live in such a way that you could sort of avoid it. But that wasn't possible in the army. In that environment, more or less, in retrospect, I sort of matured the opinion or attitude that I didn't want to live in that system."

"However, I remember August 21, 1968 exactly, most people remember that day exactly. That was when I was here with my grandmother and grandfather on holidays, because after that, when I was going to school and studying, we always came here for holidays - for a substantial part of the holidays - and on weekends. I much preferred to be here in Libiš than in my apartment in Prague. And it was here that my sisters and I were on holiday with my grandfather and grandmother, and I remember exactly where I slept, which bed we had in the bedroom. And in the morning, about seven o'clock one day, the bell rang. Grandma was already awake, she's thinking, 'Well this time in the morning... who is it? What's ringing? Who's coming to visit us, who's ringing?' She went to open the door and there was our neighbor, Mrs. Sadilkova, and she said, 'Turn on the radio, we've been attacked by the Russians.' So that was a turning point that - it's hard to describe. That's the collapse of all hope, of everything that one hoped for and thought would eventually happen."