Major Jiří Jícha

"The guard checking the entrance noticed an old man walking past the barracks, in the field, one hundred and fifty, two hundred meters from the barracks. Whereupon he reported it to the unit supervisor, who wanted to send him there. Fortunately, the elder of the unit, a sergeant-major named Král, was there, and he told him not to go crazy, not to send a man with a bayonet. So he sent Lance Corporal Plíšek and Private Kukla from the guard. It was an armed guard equipped with sixty bullets. They had bullets in the chamber. The weapon was only secured. The two armed men went to check on the so-called grandpa. I'm not sure at all... I don't think they knew they were going after a military defector! Kukla served two months. Plíšek for six months. Completely inexperienced soldiers. Plíšek was an instructor in the non-commissioned officers' school, Kukla was a soldier who was only preparing to become a commander."

"At the apprenticeship, at the age of eighteen, I was offered to study at an industrial engineering high school. It was conditional on my signing an application for the Party because they needed working-class cadres. Engineers had a problem, for example. Engineers applied to join the Party, but they couldn't accept an engineer unless five workers joined. They had a quota for that. At eighteen, you didn't think about it. My parents were in the Party, so I signed it. I wanted to study. I wanted to make something of myself, like every young person. You had different ideals. Nowadays, you look at it very differently. I didn't know about the 1950s until I was at SNB College, where Associate Professor Laurinec gave me a text, I think in my third year, about the Slánský trial. I had to read it in his office. He knew that he could trust me, so he gave me this book, saying: 'So that you know that those times were not so rosy.' CUT I found the speech of Prosecutor Urválek before the state court completely incomprehensible. That speech is well-known. Then, what was incomprehensible to me in that book was how these people confessed. I didn't find that out until I read Arthur London's confession, how they were treated. The book didn't say why. How can someone come forward and confess to being an imperialist and Zionist agent?"