Gustav Černý

"There was a post office on the corner, and there was a line of people standing next to that post office, and they were just waiting for the exchange of money, which they could exchange for one to five. So they shouted at them, 'Come with us, don't stand here!' But the people, when they had been standing there for two hours, did not want to lose the place. So I put my grandmother's bike in the barracks and chased after the procession and went with them to the square. There it was gathered in front of the town hall, protests ... And other people who were affected started going there, because it was quickly shouted. I remember such an older guy pointing with his hands ... That's how he raised his hands - and you just see a worker, those terribly cracked, black hands from work. Not from counting money, from work. So I actually understood that these people were right. I didn't yet understand the thing from that general point of view. Well, and suddenly someone said, 'Why didn't the workers from the main Skoda come too?' And someone said, 'They're locked in there. They don't want to let them out. '' Then let's go! 'There were already hundreds, maybe thousands of us ... So let's go to the gate. So we went to the fourth gate. And now I actually saw how terrible the crowd psychosis was.It was enough to point a finger and yell, and people are willing to do anything, even kill. We were just going through [those] orchards next to Slovan and someone pointed to someone a little further: 'That's the bitch she said!' Now the people: 'Which one? Over there? '-' Yeah, let's go to him! ' I don't know if they did anything to him or he defended himself because we drove up to the Skoda. So we came in front of the fourth gate. As the men tried to open the gate, it didn't work. Well, and a lady, the race guard, came out of the gate to tell us to disperse. So people started laughing, shouting at her to go away to vanish. People screamed 'Open, open!' And then a guy came out, apparently the head of the race guard. He also said, 'Go away, you have nothing to do here, it's illegal.' Then he took out a pistol and fired into the air. The crowd roared. He just shouldn't have done that. And the crowd ran, and with the bodies of those in the front — and I was there too — slammed us against the giant gates. The gate is probably still there. When you drive around, you see it. So we got a terrible blow to the snout, to the chest, but we didn't notice it at all. And as we slammed it, someone from inside suddenly opened the gate, unhooked some of the latch, the gate flew open and we could go inside. And indeed the first workshops on the right side, there were toilet windows, so they were closed by those thick screens so that no thieves could go there. And behind those sieves were men, in those toilets. They had a window open and they shouted, 'Open the doors for us! They locked us up, we can't go out! '

"Then, when I rode my bike to work at eight o'clock in the morning, I crossed Klatovská třída and I see our Czechoslovak police officers on Klatovská třída, who got completely new scorpions (guns), I recognised from their new purses shining with novelty. I wondered what was going on. And there was such a strange bustle on the street, so I drove to the bike storage room at the fifth gate. And when I put the bike there and went for a sign, the porter, who guarded the bikes there, was crying a lot. So I asked, 'Jesus Christ, madam, what happened to you?' [And] she said, 'You know nothing?' I said, 'What should I know?' - 'Well, we were occupied by the Russians.' I really didn't know, I had no idea, so I was surprised in a few words [and] then I was running into the factory. I came to the office, back in technology at the time, and of course, it was wild there. "

„We formed a huge group from that district. And once it happened like that, I don’t know, we were playing footballo or what, because there were many of us, and the group of Hitlerjugend were walking towards us, shouting something at us, so our group encyrcled them, they were in the middle. And now, of course, we didn’t have courage immediately to beat them up or so, that time had not come, but they didn’t give up, they were well trained. They were standing with backs together. I don’t know whether there were four or five of them. And one of them pulled from a bag or a case an airgun, which he „loaded“ and started aiming at us. We didn’t know what to do.... and as the time passed, one of the Hitlerjugend boys tore away, cut through the cordon that we have [created] and run to the barracks... there was that eighteenth barrack with German soldiers, they run to announce them that a group of Czechs harasses boys from Hitlerjugend. They got an order, emergency was announced and suddenly German soldiers started to run from the barracks‘ doors with flints, helmets... in an emergency. They planned to surround the whole space. So we scattered in all directions. We were used to run in all directions when we got in trouble, so no one could get caught, because they didn’t know who to catch. And that saved us, since we were returning for example from Bory or Doudlevce and no one can point a finger at us that they were there...“