Josef Vomáčka

"I went home and I knew I was to be in the radio at 7:30 in the morning, and I knew I shouldn't have gotten too drunk. I had like six beers, let's say, which I really felt. I got home at about one o'clock, I opened the windows - we lived on Fügner Square - I said to myself, I'm so drunk, I kept hearing planes buzzing, thinking that of course I was dreaming. Well, the planes were roaring, I didn't sleep well, it woke me up. Right over the rooftops the planes were roaring so much. Suddenly at about six, five thirty in the morning the bell rang. We somehow had a telephone or at one time we were allowed to have a telephone. The bell. Miloš Síkora came in, he's a painter who has been living in Paris for years, or emigrated at the turn of the regime, and he's an interesting person, he was a classmate of mine from eleven years old, from secondary school. And he said, 'Mrs. Vomáčková,' he woke my mother up, I was lying there sleepy, 'the Russians are here,' so my mother told him he was drunk, to go away. They turned on the radio and they heard all this stuff, so my mum said, "Pepíček, look, get up. Something's going on, the Russians are here and you're on duty.' She knew I was supposed to be in the radio at 7:30 in the morning, so I said, 'Hey, I'm going.' There were no mobile phones, nothing. She said, 'You don't have it until 7:30. I said, 'There's something going on, I have to go to the radio.' Síkora went with me.

"American films started to be shown. We used to go in the morning - we used to play truant to run to the cinemas. There was the French New Wave, there were the first American movies, rock 'n' roll started, we went to see Miki Volek, these bands. Actually, we cut out the Bolsheviks completely. So we grew up pretty fast, we read, and we all moved at about the same speed. The less I had in common with a Bolshevik. The '80s for us started in '60. We began to sense that opening river of information and, in fact, the growing pleasures and excitement of good literature. The little theaters started, all these things started here, so we grew up quite intellectually in proportion to that, fortunately. Really '68 was a natural outgrowth for us of the development of society."