Ing. Petr Kypr

"There's a moment that historically... Everybody says there were no East Germans in our country. And yet I remember my mother next door in Kamenická Street in Letná talking to people wearing those typical German helmets, the flat sideways ones, to distinguish them from the Wehrmacht. She spoke to them in German, so I gather that at least a couple of those troops... There were some armoured personnel carriers and tanks, so at least a couple of them may have been formally induced to come, but they withdrew very quickly afterwards. And of course I went to shoot stupidly, so within about two hours I then heard behind me, 'Stop!' and the click of the safety on the machine gun - I still remember that, that sound. So I stopped, I lost my camera, but fortunately there were no consequences."

"I took part in the activities of a hiking club, there were many of them under the House of Pioneers and Youth, and it wasn't just ours... There were circles that functioned that did camping, scouting, it just wasn't allowed to be called that. If you're interested in an episode, for example, one time we were at a camp, the camp was functioning normally, and after about a week two comrades from the State Security came there and they were very upset because there was a bulletin board and there wasn't a single article on the bulletin board about communism - I don't know, the Fourteenth Congress or the Thirteenth Congress, something like that, just like that. They were very upset. We said that these kids are not amused by this. The director of the Pioneer and Youth House had a big problem with that. So then we put something on the bulletin board, but otherwise the whole process was really what it should be, that is, the creation of a reasonable collective, the scouting that is supposed to bring out... Everybody is supposed to feel useful in some way and be themselves."