“There were no Soviets here in Šumperk. They came to the barracks there later, however, Poles were there. Věra (Čáslavská) was also there at that time. Many people were in front of Grand in the square where the statue of Stalin stood. A convoy of tanks came and because there were many people, they had to stop. The commander got out of the first tank and said: 'Why are you fooling, we are here for training, so let us go. We have to keep going.' We were communicating with the tank commander like that, and he suddenly said, 'Wait a minute, I am being called by a radio.' A little while later he came out of the tank and he was crying, his tears were dripping like this, and he said, 'Please, disperse, I have orders to shoot at you. We were shocked. So, the people dispersed. I do not know if they left, I went away from the square when he said he had orders to shoot at us."
“Krmela called me. He administrated the physical education facility and was in charge of it. He called me: 'Man, I got a call from the district committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia that Věra Čáslavská is in danger, that the KGB is looking for her.' I said: 'Do not worry, we will go to see Matlochová (gymnastics coach), and we will calm her down.' I went to see Matlochová, and I told her I had a free apartment in Vřesovka and that I would take her (Věra Čáslavská – trans.) there. I also got into trouble because of it because I did not want to go there by my car, so I borrowed a GAZ car at the airport because it was not a problem. I drove her and her friend there in the GAZ. There were two of them so she would not be alone. That is why political commissar Tureček called me a swine because I had taken the GAZ behind his back.”
“The iron window was rattling. My mom was covering my ears, dad was covering my sister´s ears. And when we got out of the cellar, we looked around – the buildings below us had been bombed, the buildings above us had been bombed, and there was an eight-metre hole in our garden where a bomb had fallen. We had plaster in full plates and the windows and doors including frames had been knocked out. It is not a nice memory."
“I skied through the inner side from the crater to the main floor and then I skied to the bottom floor where I crossed the tracks of the guys. Only a path between rocks led from the upper floor and a huge boulder that had rolled down from above and wedged itself in between them. So, there was snow covering the way to the boulder, but you could not go around it, and it was about two and a half meters down to the other snow. I sat on that boulder for a while and remembered what they were doing back home. I remembered that my wife's colleague in primary school had asked me to bring back a piece of lava from Kilimanjaro. So, I dig there and took some for me and the school. I spent about half an hour sitting there. Then I said to myself I had to jump it. So, I jumped from that two and a half meters. There was a slope, so it was no problem. Then I skied all the way down to the bottom. That was fun, but the climb back (was not). The tropical sun, there was no powder snow. When I took my skis off, I was getting stuck in shit (wet snow – trans.). I had to go on skis. It was endless. The worst part of the whole expedition was climbing Gilman’s Point."
“We did a lot of mischief as post-war children. A classmate from Loučná brought several sticks of dynamite. So, we immediately agreed on not going to school the following day and on blowing up a rock in Dlouhé Stráně. We stuffed it there, lit it, ran away, and hid behind a boulder. It was a mess. The rock disappeared; pieces as big as cars were flying around us. And then they blamed it on Bandera´s faction because its members were there at that time.”
Zdeněk Zerzáň was born on 28 April 1937 in Zlín where he, as a little child, experienced air raids by the Allies on the town. The family moved to Kouty nad Desnou after the war because of his father´s job. He trained to become a repairman of rolling stock and then he graduated from the Secondary School of Education in Brno. In 1958, he became a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, he was expelled from the Party during the normalization screenings in 1970. As chief of the Jeseníky Mountain rescue service, he hid Věra Čáslavská at a mountain cottage in Vřesová studánka for about a fortnight in 1968. In 1980, he was the first and perhaps the only person in the world to ski down the highest mountain in Africa, Kilimanjaro. In 1987, he resigned from his position as head of the Jeseníky Mountain rescue service because of politically motivated pressure. After the fall of communism, he and his associates ran an aviation company and a flight school. From 1994 to 1998 he was deputy mayor of the town of Šumperk, and he founded and was a chairperson of the Jeseníky Tourism Association for ten years. He lived in Šumperk at the time of recording in 2022. He died on November 27th, 2023.
