PhDr. František Šebej , CSc.

"As the Russians withdrew from our country, I remember that I told the journalists that it was now time for Czechoslovakia to join the North Atlantic Alliance. And at that time I did not find much understanding, almost all of them were shocked, even Vaclav Havel, whom I liked and respected, believed that such times were behind us and we no longer need military alliances. It was an instinctive thought, which sparkled in my mind, the Russian troops might have left, but the imperial instincts of the Russian ruling elite certainly had not disappeared. In the meantime, the Soviet Union collapsed and Warsaw Pact was no longer valid. I will say it retrospectively, but I only had the feeling of closure, of the final gong, that the era of the Iron Curtain, era of being on the wrong side of the political struggle, in 2004, when we enter the North Atlantic Alliance."

"It is important to realize that my whole conscious life - that happened when I was 42 - I was persuaded it was a border zone, where you would be shot upon entering. Where there were watchtowers, dogs, machine guns, and barbed wires .After 30 years have passed, and so far, when I manage to cross the border, I am also aware of it when I travel by car, but especially on foot when I walk along the Danube and go up the side of the Danube close to Petrzalka up to the Laffranconi bridge about another kilometer and a half or two more, when I reach the Austrian border and I can still continue... I can walk through the forest. I have such feeling always when I tell my dog, let's go to Austria. We are enjoying it. I believe that the sense of liberation associated with the fall of Iron Curtain cannot be sufficiently conveyed to the people who were born after 89, or who were just children at that time."