Tomáš Plichta

“I won´t forget that as I came amongst the searchers, they would show me the blades, it was like – imagine a shop window – with these squares maybe this big. And they would give you an oil pencil and a cloth; and you would hold the pencil between these two fingers and you would write. But you had to do a mirror image. And after you had covered the whole blade with writing you had to sweep it off and start again. And on next day, the same thing. That´s how you learned to write. And as I said, there were these squares, the so-called State Air Defence network. An imaginary network 4 x 4 kilometres wide. And they would communicate by the means of numbers only. So from 8 AM to 11PM or even to 1AM, we would sit in the lecture room and memorise these signals, the codes. And you would have maybe eighty coded symbols, and there were even more. For example, you would report 004152775491047 to identify the target, the position of the plane. And you had to repeat it twice, and we had to be able to process maybe sixteen codes per minute. So when they would send us to do the scrubbing, the cleaning, with brushes and so, it was like a reward.”

“On August 21st I was still a soldier, at home on leave. On Tuesday, we were sitting at the club, me and Jirka Sajbrt, we would order a bottle of wine, drink it and at maybe at half past ten in the evening we would go home. At five o clock in the morning, my older brother who just came from Topolná woke me up, saying, “You are sleeping here while we are being taken by the Russians.” And I thought, what to do now? What should a soldier on leave do in such a situation? And after I said goodbye to my family, my father told me: “Maybe you will be deployed somewhere, maybe you would have to shoot people. Remember they are Czech, and just shoot into the air, if your survival wouldn´t depend on it!”