Tomáš Kulík

“So we kept guard on Libeň Bridge, where there was a barricade and where, to tell the truth, there was no fighting. So it wasn’t until 9 May that we saw the first Russian soldiers who came to liberate us. I’ll never forget the first Russian soldier I saw. Quite the bloke he was, he seemed awfully old to me at the time, although today I’d reckon he was about 35 to 40 years old. He was walking down the street alone, towards me, bedecked with grenades, a Kalashnikov rifle, and he was leading a new lady’s racing bike. So I wondered whether he had rode on the bike all the way from Berlin, but somehow I never found out.”

“I remember that my granddad Kulík Foma went to the grocer’s one day and bought himself a 300-gramme box of cocoa. He opened it, and it was half full, or half empty, whichever you prefer. All he said was: ‘Look here, this is supposed to be 300 grammes?’ And he intimated that the government was robbing the people. He just said that as an aside. They came for him three days later, three months later we received word that he had been sent to Siberia, and seven month later, that is, after a year in total, we were informed that a tree had fallen on him and that he had succumbed to his severe wounds.”

“The second phase started; for many, it was a phase of freedom. But for me, from what I heard and from what I felt, what my mum told me, for me that freedom was not so great. Because basically what happened was what one [man] said back in the days when I was assigned to forced labour at the Hejduk and Faix factory in Vysočany. One Werkshutz there told us: ‘When the Russians come, we’ll throw these Protectorate badges away, put stars on our caps, and carry on as usual.’ Well, that’s pretty much what happened. Except they weren’t Werkschutzes any more, they were gatekeepers, then they were the People’s Militia, and so on. But the freedom... we actually choked on it to begin with. But I could still see, I could sense that we were headed into what my mum told me about Russia, the Soviet Union, and that’s what happened in the end.”