Miroslav Pilík

“I felt bad about the occupation; I almost didn’t eat anything for the whole week, because I kept saying to myself: ‘This just cannot be.’ Nothing was happening here, so why? If there had been some great revolt or something… well, but there was nothing and the situation was quite stable and they suddenly did this. When you saw the roads and everything being destroyed by the tanks and how much damage was done. They invaded the country like locusts.”

“He left me there; at that time we were working there and demolishing the abandoned houses which were close to the border zone. One reason for the demolitions was so that ‘intruders’ as they were called at that time would not abuse them. Some of them were passing through there, although it was difficult for them to cross the border, anyway. We as soldiers were thus demolishing some of the houses and securing them, and we got some discarded trucks from the army, they were the Tatra 128, which was a real junk, and some bulldozers and diggers. We did this work in the area which stretched from Děčín here, from Petrovice, and all the way to the Saint Sebastian Mountain, which is somewhere by Chomutov, and the zone reached all the way there.”