Miloslav Benda

“Interrogation took place in January in Stříbro. But I also have to say that three days after my arrest, my wife was allowed to visit me. She said that she got official permission from the local officials to come to see me because the officials offered her the opportunity to divorce me. She also started talking about police searching our house so the guards interrupted us and sent her home.”

“When the armies of the Warsaw pact came I was coming home late at night every day so I didn't hear anything about it on the radio. In the morning, I went to work and my assistant came as well, and we arrived at the barracks, opened the shop and started selling groceries. And officers came to the shop and I asked one of the officers if it was alright that I didn't get my supplies and if the bus was coming as usual. And he told me: 'The bus will come as usual but take a look outside what is happening.' I went out of the barracks and looked at the field and there I saw one tank next to another, the whole field full of tanks. So I told my assistant to go home and closed the shop. I was riding a motorcycle at that time. We came to the main road and we could not go any further because traffic was stuck. We had to ride through the field because the passage between the tanks and other military vehicles was blocked by foreigners who were trying to get out of the country through Rozvadov. One car after another. So we had to push the motorcycle until Bor.”

“The court was right next to the prison. And when they led me there I asked where they were taking me and they told me to shut up. So we came to the court. There were about six or eight judges and they all had papers in front of them where the whole interrogation was recorded. The interrogation was carried out by a guard who tried to implicate me in things I opposed. And when he said that I refused to cooperate with the municipality and that I said I wouldn't let them rape my religion, I had to object to that word being a part of my vocabulary. I would never say that. I had to repeat what I had said at the municipal meeting and that was that religion is dearer to me than their politics. He crossed that out and wrote: 'He followed the directions of the pope in Rome... ' I don't remember how it went on. But that that was how my case was processed.“

“I reached Trmice. The local inn that was already taken. There was the 'settlement' official in the office above the hall who gathered all the request forms and processed them. I went up to talk to him and I found that he was German. It scared me a bit but he probably sensed that and said: 'Listen, I'm German but I'm an anti-fascist. When the Nazis came they put all of us in jail and we got out at the end of the war.' So we talked a bit and I asked him about the shop. He told me where the shop was and we went out to have a look at it. It was right next to the electricity plant. The shop was nice but I looked inside and saw the German owners still doing something inside. And I felt so bad I wouldn't dare step inside. When you see that it is somebody else's property and you know he has to leave it behind... I told to the official. 'Listen, I'll take it but I can't go inside now.'”

“I got a car with a wood gas engine with which we drove to my shop to Ovčáry to take some sacks with sugar and some spices. We were coming back and the driver told me we also had to stop by at the police station in Všetaty, that they have some machine guns and schells there. So we stopped there and put all that on the sacks with sugar, covered it with a blanket and hurried down to Lejkov. We were passing the rairoad tracks and we saw soldiers laying on the grass, sunbathing and drying their clothes. We stopped for a while and were not sure whether we could go on. Then the driver hot out, he prodded the fire a bit and we said: 'Now or never.' And we drove quickly past the soldiers but none of them moved.“