Ivan Kalina

"And right from the morning, you could say, the duties began, because the paining room in the theater was in full swing, we distributed leaflets, wrote on trolleybuses. The most important activity of the theater at that time was probably that there was a very modern recording studio at that time in the rehearsal room one, and from there not only our actors broadcasted, they mainly presented. They broadcasted to the whole Europe thanks to a long-wave transmitter in Topolná street. They broadcasted everything, everything what was happening, what they learned from Prague, etc. We young people guarded this broadcast, we were going around Zlín to find out when the Russians would come, and so on."

"And, of course, I didn't know anything about monetary reform at the age of ten or eleven or how exactly old I was in 1953, just between the tenth and the eleventh. And I know, I remember well that on the one hand there was confusion at school, suddenly no one taught us, we were in class, we felt locked up there, that we were not allowed anywhere. A teacher always came to reassure us, then left again. I know we were making swallows out of paper and wrote, 'We want to go home,' and threw them out of the window. And then suddenly the parents started coming to pick the students up during the morning and we finally started to learn what was happening. I know that from the windows we saw buses full of police forces. And then I remember the way home pretty well. My parents didn't come for me. My mother, she ran around Pilsen from assembly to assembly and manifested. My father took care of everything else and I went home alone through Pilsen. And I remember the overturned tram in Solní Street, where we used to live before and which I had to go through, and of course there were a lot of people around it. However, I got home without any problems, my father was all nervous where my mother was, he was very worried about her. We waited, well, then mom came home around lunchtime."

"[My brother] was in Yugoslavia, I met him there in 1966, after fifteen years we, brothers, saw each other. He knew me as a nine-year-old boy. My wife and I came to Belgrade on an invitation. There he was working for two or three years. He simply established branches of Pan American in the East."

"Experiences from the war. Or I remember my father sending us to... I don't actually remember it, I know it from the stories that people were saying, but I come to that memory. My father just sent us to see my grandfather in Merklín, because Pilsen was bombed hard. And I remember that we were there in Merklín on the so-called Golden Hill and I saw planes flying towards Pilsen. I just remember standing there looking at the section of those planes. These are my experiences of the war. Thanks God that I do not have any others.