Dalibor Dědek

"There they interrogated us for 24 hours, the whole point was that they wanted to know what documents we had come into contact with, what was in the charts, whether we hadn´t, God forbid, photographed it. I took the films I had photograps on and as soon as I got home I burned everything. We knew what we used to carry, I always used to carry the Warsaw Pact plans for the next five years on a city bus in a tin tube. Every time I was going past the villa where the American ambassador lived just outside the Ministry of National Defence, I thought I'd ring the bell and say - Here's something for you to look at. They were asking us (Military Counterintelligence officers) to find out if we had really come into contact with the documents and what we remembered of them. Then they confronted us with each other, had us sign a lot of papers, went to see us. I know that we, for example, we had been cleaning up and taking out the trash, so they wanted to know if we had been taking out the trash and wanted us to tell them what our superiors were writing about. Then they gave us a break for a while, then the chief called us in and said - Guys, what happened is, these documents shouldn't have gotten to us in the first place. It should have stayed with the armaments administration in the Ministry of Defence. But they were lazy to do such slave work there and they didn't want to do it, so they gave it to their subordinates and they in turn gave it to their subordinates and it ended up with us or with you. When it finished, they paid extraordinary bonuses to somebody in the Ministry of Defence for doing it. Their subordinates came to complain that it was them who had handled it. Military Counterintelligence stepped in and found that it had fallen down to us simpletons who had nothing to do with it and shouldn´t have come into contact with it. And that was us, it fell to us. That episode had its consequences, when I went into business, I was doing security technologies and I had to ask for a screening. I found out that I had a record there, I was listed as a Secret Service collaborator. I signed a paper saying that I would give them truthful information. It was while I was locked up. It was the same case as President´s Havel. From this point of view."

"In that August of '68. We liked to sleep in the attic with my sister, it smelled of hay, there were old beds, we read at night by torchlight. In the morning, when the Russians invaded, my sister cried that it was a war. I didn't understand if she was playing at something, so I went downstairs. Grandma was listening to the radio, airplanes were droning outside, then tanks were driving on the roads. It was a huge shock for us, I remember my mum came home from work by train, I think it was 11 o'clock. The first thing Mum did was stand in the queue for food, everybody was buying food, they were afraid there would be a shortage of food. She brought flour, pasta, she brought a whole salami, which was something for us kids, it was a big investment. Some people tried to express their disapproval of the Russians invading. The radio was full of reports that people had been shot in Liberec. We were scared. We lived at the road to Jičín, and people were putting posters on the wooden caravan, like - Ivan, go home! There were reports and information that the Russians had shot similar places to pieces. My parents decided that it would be safer, because they were going to work, to take us to the other grandma in Karlovice, it was about three kilometres away on foot, and more sheltered. They packed a small suitcase for us, we walked past the back of the cemetery, along a dirt road. When we came to an asphalt road, there was written in lime - Hang the collaborator Machačný! That was my grandfather. When my parents saw it, they had serious doubts if they were leading us in the right direction. When we arrived at my grandma and grandpa's house, my grandfather was chopping wood in the yard. Dad started discussing the Russian occupation with him, Grandpa was a diehard communist and started swinging an axe at Dad. So the idea of staying there was quickly abandoned. And they took us home again."