Jitka Roubíčková

"Once the one who worked at the airport, so it was August '68, and she said was going on holiday, she was going by plane. And then we were sort of [sitting] there in the evening, smoking, drinking, packing. They had a taxi booked for 4 o'clock in the morning, and they left, but they came back a little while later. I said, 'What are you doing here, you're supposed to be on a plane?!' Well, girl, I can't. The airport's closed, there are huge planes landing and armoured vehicles coming out.' I said, 'You made that up, it's a great joke, it´s not possible, why and what does it mean? And so we were thinking, what could it be, that we would be able to get rid of the communists, that it would be the Americans? And so we were there fooling around, laughing about it, and we were like, no, but that's so weird. So we turned on the radio and then we couldn't believe it."

"And in August of the sixty-ninth year, it was very sad, very terrible, because we were being driven off the street near Jungmannovo Square, actually part of Národní Street, by militiamen, fellows in grey uniforms of Czech nationality, and I thought to myself, this is really terrible. We ran somewhere...where is the garden, well, you see how it slipped my mind. Františkánská [garden]. How we used to sit there in the sixties, I used to go to the Semafor [theatre] that year in '67, it was just amazing, the few years I was there in Prague. I have recalled that, because originally Semafor was there for the longest time, it was located in that passage as you walked into the Františkánská Garden."