Vladislav Kabíček

"I just know that I played football for the pupils in Zeleneč, so we were always lined up before the game as we see it today. And the referee, he was a local citizen, said, quite literally, 'Bastards, the war is over, don't salute by raising your right hand!' That was saying, 'Hail to sport and to the country!' and he was saying that the war was over, and don't let anybody think of raising the hand. Of course he forgot, and we all didn't raise that right hand, but he stepped forward and raised his hand, automatically. So it was ridiculous."

"We called it Vrbičky near Zeleneč, we hurried there and looked at it and we didn't have any fears at all that we should hide. We saw it as a theatre. And the truth is that when the fighters shot down a German plane that had crashed, for example, somewhere in the fields near our school, one of my classmates, so when it was already confiscated by the German army, but they left the plane there, the boys went there with keys, with a screwdriver, and took away parts from it. I remember he brought in a dynamo, which if you spun it and the wires from it, you got a blow. At school we used to carve sets for a puppet show and they'd plug in these metal chairs under the desks and spin the dynamo in the back to get some of that punch from it. So for us kids, all of this meant - of course, we heard from our parents exactly what it was really like - but we as kids thought it was some kind of theatre, you could say."