MUDr. Jan Stavěl

"I remember August 21, 1968 as I remember it today. I was at home and still asleep when my father came running and shouted at me to get up, that the Russians were here. He opened the blinds and turned on the TV. Then my mother came from the collective farm, she worked in the livestock factory, and we sat down in front of the TV and listened to the news. At nine thirty my parents told me to go to the store to get pastry. When I got there, all the shelves were empty. I asked what was going on and they told me that people had been going there since the morning with two-wheelers and buying everything. We were sitting in front of the TV and people were already stocking up, saying there was going to be a war."

"It was a nice childhood for me, even though the year I was born was the year of most executions, as I read. It was the Stalin era, although Stalin died six months after I was born, so it was still reverberating. But a child sees it with his own eyes. I didn't realize that it was a difficult time until 1968, when I was scrounging in the attic where old papers and leaves had been thrown away. I found a letter in which our village secretary proposed that my father be declared a kulak. Although he didn't qualify with his eighteen hectares, he was raising pigs and growing clover for seed, so he should have been dismembered. I was reminded of this yesterday when I saw the film All the Good Folks. Fortunately, our village Communist Party chairman at the time was a friend of my father's. He [father] came to him and said that this time it could still be pulled off, but next time no one would stop it, and father had to join the cooperative."