Jiří Miler

“It was just like it had always been before. When you did something else somewhere, they applauded you, but in secret. New eras and new challenges are coming. For instance, one of my former colleagues wrote me recently: ‘Jirka, I appreciate you the most for that moment, for your speech and for the fact that you probably could have lost your job there.‘ So yes, but nobody said nothing publicly. It even happened that , I will skip to the future now and then come back, when the revolution was over, some people started to be afraid of me because they thought that I would become the dean. I had spent half a year at the faculty, I was thirty and had no ambition to be in the high university management, I even did not want to enter politics, but I had already said that. And they suddenly thought: ‘He will be the one who is going to make decisions!‘ Because they were in past used to someone else making decisions about them.”

“The storm was not a storm, but it was tanks. It was the very first contact with occupation in 1968. In my opinion, it happened on Wednesday, and it was ten days until the end of holidays, so we as small children started to fight. I remember it very well because there was an old quarry in our village which was no longer used at that time. They made a base for the transmitters there, they had about five soldiers there, but they forgot about them. They left the soldiers there and they had nothing to eat. So, they started to pick our fruit. I climbed into the attic, and there was an air rifle there and I shot at them with it. I remember that my grandmother came and gave me a hard slap on the mouth, and then I did not continue."