Jiří Lexa

“I was an employee of the ‘Nealkoholické nápoje Olomouc’ company. We had places of business all over north Moravia. I lived in the unfinished 7th district. All of a sudden, the director’s Tatra 603 pulled over at my house, the bell rang, and they told me to go back to work immediately because we had to fix a machine in Karviná. This had never happened before, that someone would come for me. It made a fuss in our building. When I arrived at the workplace in Slezská Opava, we learned that a bottle capping machine in Karviná had been broken. It was a machine for stoppering eight bottles, a rotary machine that weighed around one ton. It was a common fault that could have been fixed in a couple hours. But because the first anniversary of the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia was coming up and counteractions were expected, our company’s management got nervous that it would be terrible if the shafts and iron works weren’t supplied with non-alcoholic drinks. That’s why they decided to buy a brand-new machine for several hundred thousand crowns which they had delivered from Chotěboř. We then spent the whole night replacing the old one with it.”

“On that August 21 I was standing at a bus stop at around 5 a.m., there were about twenty or thirty other people there. Suddenly we heard noise. Three military helicopters flew low over our heads. I thought to myself that it must be some military exercise. No one had any idea, everyone just looked. When we arrived at Hulvácký hill, there were trucks, armored cars, some tanks. Hundreds of soldiers everywhere around. People had already started gathering and discussing. I went to the Smetana square and walked to our workshop by the Sýkora bridge. We were a small team, about three people. No one had any idea what was going on. The telephone wasn’t working. The only connection with the world, the cable radio, was turned off. So, in agreement with my colleagues I took the bus back home and brought with me a transistor radio, so that we could hear what was going on.”