Milan Linhart

"The hole - it's not worth talking about. Those were such niceties. You were alone in the cell. You had two mattresses, so rotten, so ugly, with kind of horsehair inside. You had two blankets, two mattresses. And that was it. And what you were wearing, tracksuit bottom. Well, now [the guard] would come in there, for example, and take a bucket of that greasy soap, dump it on the floor, and pour four or five buckets of water in there. Of course, there was no canal. You had to take off your tracksuit jacket, the tracsuit top, the brown, ugly one, and you had to wipe it with that and wring it out into the toilet. When you put five or six handfuls of that greasy soap in there like that, there was foam everywhere, the mattresses got soaked, wet, damp, cold. Not to mention the food. Once a week, you'd go to the shower, and when you got there, they'd turn off the hot water. I got knocked out a couple of times in there too, got hooked up behind the heater, got a nice beating and was sent back in. And what also happened to me was that even though it was solitary confinement, you were supposed to be there alone, they put a boy in there for about a week who had gangrene in his leg and they had amputated his leg. And they must have done it very badly and kept making him try some weird prosthesis. It didn't fit the leg at all. He was screaming all night. There was no soothing medication. For a whole week, until they took him somewhere at the end of that week, and then I found out he died. I guess that's the memory I have of it."

"It wasn't basically a parade, it was just groups of people pushing each other, all trying to get to the post office, to the center, but they had it blocked. They had Masarykova Street blocked, there were armoured personnel carriers, from Becherovka on the other side to the Praha cinema, there were water cannons and they were spraying water into Jaltská Street, there were rubbish bins, there were rubbish bins flying through the air, all the people were getting drenched. One boy was caught, he was lifted up at the entrance, he was left lying there. Well, they just beat people and they had it all cordoned off so people couldn't get to the center because Thermal didn't exist yet. From the bottom, from Kriváň to the post office, the People's Militia was pushing it in a big way - batons, they were armed with machine guns. Complete idiots. And from the other side, there were armoured vehicles, Public Security. So actually they pushed all those people who were concentrated on Masarykova, all the way to Becherovka, they pushed it from there. So those people didn't have a chance, so they were running, they were gathering more or less in the side streets, like in Zeyerova, in that Jaltská Street. And there they advanced from the other side from Staliňák. There were policemen there, they had a big station next to the church, so from there they were beating the people from the other side, and people had nowhere to run. So then they were running away through different side streets. They dispersed, whoever could zigzag, zigzagged. Well, we ran to Tuhnice because we lived in Tuhnice."

"...a boy from Bratislava, whom we called Slámko, slept there with us. Well, when I came back after that vacation, I met this friend and he told me that they [the Soviet occupiers] had shot Slámko. And that he was lying covered with a flag in the passage of the Blaník cinema. So we went there to see him. Of course he was covered, there were eight bodies covered. And so we were just pissed off, there's no other way to describe it. And the rage - young teenagers, so we went down Štěpanská Street, now there was this little GAZ vehicle. He had a machine gun on top. They were repairing the pavaments in Štěpánská Street and there were cobblestones. And we boys couldn't think of anything but to take a few of those cobblestones and throw them at them. But we could not even throw it at them, we were weak. And now they were coming and all we could hear was somebody shooting in the air. We got scared, scared, so we ran right into the first house, there was a big classic oak door. We ran into the house, there was a staircase, behind the staircase there was a kind of a mezzanine, and down into the yard, into the yard we disappeared. And the next day we went down there to see. And the door there, there were six or seven holes, and a completely split wooden staircase. As they wete shooting at us with a machine gun. So those are my memories of the 1968."