Miroslav Lapiš

“And when we were approaching Ostrava, around five kilometres from the city, suddenly there was an army troop, the place was called Hradečník, and the troop was Czech, but locked up and all of a sudden there were tanks coming out with Mongolians in them. Well I said Mongolians, as they were all skew-eyed, I really do not know, where they were from, And they did not know themselves, where they were coming and where they got to. And they drove towards us with the machine guns pointing at us. We marched in four lines and I suspected it was getting rough, so I was trying to get to the side trench, although I was supposed to walk in the middle. But of course the line changed as everyone wanted to be at the side. They drove along with us for about two kilometres still aiming at us and the boys were shouting some kind of wrong passwords. We had our flags only halfway up and various signs and they still did not understand at all and they did not speak a work in Czech. It lasted for about twenty minutes, and suddenly they got an order from their leaders and they turned left and let us go on. So we got to Ostrava in front of the town hall and made a petition. Someone read it and all the miners from the Ostrava-Karviná region gathered there. There were indeed thousands of miners there.”

“My friend kept teasing me: ´Come on, we'll go there.´ I did not think so much and I said: ´And how do we escape? Well it seems... it is not possible, man cannot get there without a foreign exchange form.´ That was it. ´Well, yeah, we're going to Yugoslavia with some travel agents.´ It was possible that way. I refused him. He went with that travel agents and never came back. He stayed in Austria, where he established a locksmith, he made fences, gates and all. He's the boss, he's got a couple of people employed there. The worst thing was that when he was escaped, the secret police came in three weeks and began to interrogate everyone. One by one, there were about five of us, just young boys, including old men, those old people who worked there, maybe sixty-year-olds; they also had to go to the interrogation. They led us up one by one and squeezed us like a lemon, each and every one. So I did not confess anything, did not say we joked around the topic.”