PaedDr. Karel Kovařovic

"It was very dramatic. I witnessed, for example, that barricades were being erected, just like in 1945. In Vinohradská Street and Italská Street, barricades were being built out of everything people could find, from rubbish bins to old cars, wrecks and so on. Unfortunately, that was also the place where two lives of young boys ended, who were not shot but were squeezed onto the barricade in Italská. The tank pushed them onto the barricade and they died. The Hajnovka, which was set on fire by shelling, burned down. The Czech people were the cause of it: they set fire to a Russian truck that had uniforms piled on top. But there was ammunition underneath, and nobody knew that there was ammunition. When the truck was on fire, the ammunition started to explode, and of course it caught fire from that. When I came back from the blood transfusion station, I was helping mainly on Italian Street. I was hiding in a house there, and I heard gunfire. Of course, it was very dramatic there. I remember there was a tank up in Italská Street above the Trade Unions Council building, and it had the whole street in its full view and could shell it. There was a situation where a boy who was crossing Italská Street... I don't know if the shooting headed into the pavement or if it was into him, but I know it was probably from a machine gun. He got hit, got hit in the stomach. He stayed conscious, stayed on the pavement. I feel it through my impressions, but at that point you could hear a pin drop. I can still hear the boy saying goodbye to his family very well. He was saying goodbye to his girlfriend. And I said, 'We can't let him bleed out on the pavement, we've got to get him out of here somehow!' So we went through the backyards to get an ambulance to take him. We contacted army truck 805. These were these 'ducks' that were bevelled, with a huge Red Cross emblem on the truck body. A car from the theater drove into the Italská Street. As the eight-hundred-five was high, they wanted to run over him and have him between the wheels, so the wounded and the staff would be covered. That they would load him on a truck and they would take him away."

"We climbed on the tanks, we talked to them, at least we tried to talk to them. We asked what they were doing here, why were they here? And they kept telling us that there was a counter-revolution here, that they had come to save us. The consequence was, I think, demoralization, because I think they understood that very soon. They must have been very scared. They were always expecting that somebody would attack them, that somebody would shoot. For example, on Palacký Square, on the front building behind the Palacký Monument, which has a tower with a gallery.So on that gallery there were Russian soldiers with machine guns, and they were shooting across the Vltava River to the other side - to the Smíchov side, where there were also Russians. Because they saw some people with guns there. And they started shooting at them, so they were shooting at their own people. We didn't have any weapons. That's why we were telling them - this is a little bit similar to the year eighty-nine: 'We have bare hands.' We kept showing them that we had nothing, that there was no counter-revolution. And then, because we're a Švejk´s nation, it turned into a bit of a joke. Like, we'd wrap a piece of coal in a handkerchief and we acted act as if we had a radio, that we were listening to the radio. And now a Russian soldier came and said, 'Davaj, davaj, syuda. [Give it, give it to me].' So we showed them, 'Well, take it, the coal.' Or maybe people came to a tank and asked the soldiers if they needed water. 'Nado vam vody? [Do you need water]?' 'Da, da, spasibo. [Yes, yes, thank you].' So they brought water in a bucket and poured it into the canal in front of them. Or a guy and a girl stood in front of a tank and started kissing - things like that. It must have been something terrible for their psyche. I think the psychological stress resulted in them shooting practically at everything possible because they were scared. And after about five days, after a week, this first wave was sent back. Guard soldiers came in in marked uniforms. It was already a legitimate army, which was very austere, didn't talk to anybody, already kept its distance from the population. And that's when the real occupation was taking place."

"And at the moment when [the truck that was supposed to load the wounded boy] entered Italská Street from above, they started shooting at it. Although it was marked, it had a fifty-centimetre Red Cross emblem on it. So he drove it back across the street to the theatre or beneath the theatre and the boy was still there. At that moment, I put the band [with the Red Cross] that I had on my left arm to my right arm. I picked up the medical bag and stuck my hand out of the house like this in front of me so that it could be seen. It was quiet, there was no sound, no gunfire. So I walked out of the corridor of the house. I walked up to the boy and I said, 'It's okay. I'm with you now.' I pulled the bag over my shoulder and put my hands underneath him. And it's a paradox, it's actually physically impossible, but I heard the gunshot first, then nothing for a while, and then I felt the shot hit me. But I had the boy there. I picked him up off the ground, and probably the way I picked him up saved my life, because of course it was a dead body, it was behaving like a dead organism. So I put his shoulder blades in front of me like that. The bullets probably headed into the pavement, that was also the diagnosis of the doctor who treated me. It was probably a deflected bullet. The first shrapnel stayed in my shoulder blade and the second shrapnel tore my shoulder. But I don't know anymore, because I fell over the wounded boy. I don't know how they got me out of there, but I actually woke up in paradise. At least from my point of view. I opened my eyes and I saw one female breast, a second female breast, a third female breast. I thought, 'Well, it doesn't look so bad in heaven.' I was lying in a maternity ward in Londýnská Street. I was lying on the floor between the beds and it was just breastfeeding time. So they had me lying on the floor. I was there until the next day, and they just gave me injections with antibiotics, and above all, they said, 'You have to get away from Prague and you have to go to any medical facility.'"

“I was there as a lay medic, I mostly delivered material where it was needed. Our seat was in one house in Italská Street and in Italská Street on the other side of Vinohradská Street there where the Central Union Council is, that white tiled building, so there was a Russian tank positioned in such a way that the crew could oversee the whole Italská Street. In one moment, a young man was crossing the street. We heard shots and the young man was wounded in the stomach. He fell to the ground immediately but he remained conscious. At that time, I felt that there was a total silence. And in that silence, we could only hear the boy saying his goodbyes to his family, to his girlfriend. I was a bit moved, naturally, there was a man bleeding to the pavement just in front of me, I said, ‘We can’t leave him there, we need to get him out of there.’ I walked out of the building and I held my medic bag with the Red Cross emblem on my hand so that they would see I was a medic. Nothing was happening so I made one more step so that they could see my armband with the medic sign. Silence, again. I dared to go to the boy. I managed to tell him ‘Hey, it’s good now, we will save you now.’ In denial of all laws of physics, I first heard the shots and only then I fell to the ground. I was probably hit with stray bullets. It’s what the doctor in the hospital told me, that they were stray bullets. One bullet tore my shoulder, the other one remained lodged at my shoulder blade. But I don’t know about this, though, because I guess I fell across the boy and I woke up only at the hospital. In the hospital, they took out the bullet at the scapula, they bandaged my wounds, they gave me some injections against the inflammation and said: ‘You need to get out of Prague right away, it’s expected that they will go and check the hospitals for gunshot wounds, they will be looking for the so-called counter-revolution.’”

"I witnessed dramatic events, such as the death of two boys who were squashed by a tank against a barricade. The bodies were laid in Italská Street. There was a shop of a butcher, a butcher's workshop, and there was such a gate, a wide gate for trucks, and in that gate, there were laid the corpses shrouded in Czechoslovak flags, of those who fell." "How did you feel about it, what were your impressions?" "I didn't feel sorry, I was rather angry inside: 'What are they doing here, what do they want?' I know that the soldiers in the streets did not know much about it. Most of them were Kyrgyz, Kazakh, slant-eyed. They did not wear uniforms, just the insets for jackets, for fighting in winter. Only after about a week, these first line units were substituted by a regular army, those wore uniforms. The first line soldiers were then probably moved to Russia, somewhere to Ussuri. They were demoralised. What was interesting, they had maps where there was a map of Bohemia which was marked Germania in Cyrilic. So they thought they were in Germany. They were indeed surprised that we all here speak Russian. That we know it quite well, even better than some of the soldiers who had learnt Russian only in the army."

"Erm, obviously. I took the flag from storage and I started like a revolutionary, saying that I would go downtown. Mum tried to calm me down, she said, "There's shooting going on, you're going nowhere." So I stayed at home and listened to the radio, to the TV, to all news we were getting from sources which were not manipulated yet. In the afternoon, an announcement was aired, requesting that people donate blood, that Czech blood is shed around the Radio and that they invite all the blood donors, or, donors, to please come to the transfusion unit to donate blood. I had two donations past me so I was able to donate, with lab certification, they knew my blood group, antigens and the like, so I pretended that I was going to donate blood and went to Ruská Street to the transfusion unit. I have to say, it was an interesting situation because people were standing in a queue to donate blood. One rarely experiences this. The doctors and nurses were looking for someone who would go to the space of Italská and Vinohradská Streets as they had no staff there and the basic medical supplies ran out. So, I was equipped with such a leather bag with red cross on it, I got an arm and with a red cross and on board of the RN Praga truck, called Erena in slang, I was transported to the vicinity of Vinohradská Street. Obviously, it is hard to talk about it today and people probably wouldn't understand it but there was a regular fighting going on. There was gun fire, barricades were being built. I was present when people of Prague managed to set a Russian tank on fire, in a side street off Vinohradská. The tank crew disbanded but at the time before the whole tank was set alight, when only the engine was on fire, dexterous people climbed on it and commenced dismouting of the machine gun which they carried away from the burning tank. I don't know where it ended up."