Petr Karmazín

"The square was full, and from Chrastava the tanks drove around, not through the square, but around the town hall, then they drove up to almost the square again, actually to the corner of the square, and drove as if to Švermák. When I got there, now a lot of people, now everybody there was threatening the Russians and so on, and when I was leaving I was going back to Pražská Street. And I was going down, I was about fifty meters in that Pražská street and suddenly there was a noise and then just shooting. At that moment you don't know where it's coming from, it just echoed between the buildings. The square lay on the ground, we jumped into the passage, I jumped into this recessed entrance. Then it stopped, I was up there, now I don't know if I went back to look or not, but maybe I did. And what happened was that one of those tanks, in that sharp turn, when it was going like towards the square and then turning, I said Švermák, but Šalďák, Šaldovo Square, sorry. So in that sharp turn it got skidded on the cobblestones that were there and it went into the house."

"I graduated from high school in 1960 and started working for Lesostavby Liberec and I worked on the construction site in Josefův Důl, building housing units. And on the morning, I don't know now what day it was, the twenty-first, I have an impression if it wasn't Monday, because I got up in the morning, we put the radio on the wire, I don't know if you have any idea what it was. It was a kind of a radio broadcast around town on the wires, one station. Well, I put it on for the time, the time signal, and now I'm listening and I'm saying, what's going on?! It's some kind of radio play that comes on at six in the morning, a war play. My parents got up - and they were trained from the war, they heard the planes flying, so they said, now there's one plane after another flying from the border towards Prague. I went to work, I came there - and I had most of the staff there were Poles, Polish workers who came from Poland. They weren't there, they didn't let them cross the border anymore."