Petr Kautský

"So we were there for about five days. Practically for the whole period of the occupation, until our delegation arrived after the signing of the protocols from Moscow and all these broadcasts had to be cancelled, not only the Czech ones, but all these radios. And we were there, people were changing day and night, it was running all the time. And there were porters on standby in the gatehouse because sometimes, not a tank, but a Russian armored carwould come. That was a danger, because we didn't know all the time whether we were going to be caught, the transmission, because it went from there to somewhere, I mean to that Tehova just by cable and something by air. So there was a hole in the fence and it was arranged with the neighbours, with the neighbouring house, so several times when there was an alarm that something was coming, we ran through that fence and hid in their cellar. The car went over and we came back. Nothing ever happened."

"The morning of August 21, noise, planes, so my dad woke me up early to tell me what was going on. So I went straight to the radio, to the newsroom. We all met there, we were staring from the balcony, it was on the second floor, there's a balcony, what was going on down there. There were already crowds there and tanks were coming in. Then they went through the newsroom there, they didn't say anything to us yet, the soldiers, such greenhorns they were. They cut all the telephone wires so that we couldn't use the telephone. I think, if it were now, there would be more of those wires everywhere. Back then, there was only one phone cable and one radio cable. So we didn't know what was going on, and then, it was about ten o'clock, they came in with machine guns and drove us out. It wasn't as dramatic as in Madl's excellent film The Waves, because there it was the Czech editorial office, there it was something else. But they pushed us out and we went. So I went home and the next day I got a call from a colleague from the editorial office saying, 'Petr, come to the villa,' and he didn't say anything else. So I understood and I went there and there was already a foreign Radio Prague broadcast going on, and in a continuous broadcast, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Russian were alternating every ten minutes. And the Italians had a teletype machine there, and they listened to the news on the radio too, and they wrote those individual reports. The Italian always went there to read it when it was his turn."