David Matásek

"We had the feeling that our gubernia, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, was pursuing some determined project of its own. I was 26 years old, or 25 years old, so I liked to provoke the establishment or the upper class. So to some extent I was asking for some things - whoever went to a demonstration, of course, had to count on just being beaten by the cops, or at least being sprayed with a water cannon, which was kind of our sport. Whoever was wetter won. So it wasn't exactly, well it was just toothless already, their, well I don't want to say terror, maybe that's too strong a word, but just the regime."

"We lived in Vackov, just above Ohrada, in a workers' quarter, in a terraced house with my mother, father and grandmother. And my mother walked then, because the transport through Wenceslas Square was not possible at all, and because my other grandmother lived in Podolí, she went to see her on foot, or whatever. And we had no news of her, no mobile phones, I think even the phone boxes didn't work because of the occupation. My parents believed in the reform process, in the Prague Spring of 1968, and somehow, I think, they understood quite fundamentally that it was over. And I saw my dad crying for the first time in my life, and it was a terrible experience for me, for a five-year-old boy, to see the demigod that you have on that pedestal the most, your parents. Suddenly I saw that he was also weak, that he was afraid of something. Then it took a while, or I mean after that it took 40 years, but then it took a while, sorry, it was 20 years, before they pulled away, but my mother and I used to drive along the river where the military settlement was in Malečice in the meadow. It was really the Russians, from the Warsaw Pact, it was this nation. And they had a field kitchen there, some tents and so on, they just had a military encampment there, and my mother and I used to go there. Mum used to ride a men's Favorit bicycle and I was sitting on the frame and we were riding around and I was singing 'Go home, Ivan' in a resistance way. That's what I remember, those are two completely personal experiences of the occupation."