Bohdan Zilynskyj

"What sticks in my memory the most is crossing the border because it was so startling and undignified. They drove everybody off the trains in Čop on the Soviet side of the border and locked us in the station building where you couldn't get a drink or anything. For about two hours they searched the luggage of those who were going to the Ukraine or even further, just to see if they were bringing anything that wasn't allowed. I suspect was solely up to those customs officers to declare something undesirable and jsut confiscate it. It was like an introduction to the weird side of the Soviet world. Of course, we didn't know much about it before. Then suddenly we get this kind of 'welcome' on their side of the border. That stuck with me awfully strongly and then, well, the condescending attitude of some of the officials and the station master most of all - he was just this big cheese who made the decisions."

"Anyway, I think 21 August was the second or third day after we had arrived. So, I witnessed it in Kiev where seemingly nothing was happening, right? The local society sort of took note of it. The fact is that newspapers came out terribly late that day. See, I was interested in local newspapers every time I went abroad, and they also came out on 21 August but they were hours late than usual; they had to adjust them adequately. What is interesting is that, in the days to come, we would meet many Ukrainian intellectuals who disagreed with it and simply saw it as a collapse of their own hopes that they had associated with it."

"I was in Kiev with my father on 21 August 1968. It was actually my second visit to Ukraine. I had been in Subcarpathia in a village a year prior. We had arrived in Kiev about two days earlier [ed.note: before 21 August 1968] and, of course, the impact was felt."

"My grandfather from eastern Ukraine who held these leftist yet non-communist views, simply a socialist of the Ukrainian independence movement as it was called, escaped not with the first wave of Ukrainian emigration in 1919 or 1920, but only after he was arrested, and managed to escape via Poland to Czechoslovakia sometime in 1922. He never saw his home again."

"I have been exposed to the activities of the relatively poor or small Ukrainian minority in Prague since the end of 1989, because we had relatively low key contacts with other centres. We founded - such was the approach of other national minorities too - the Civic Forum of Ukrainians, which was then renamed the Association of Ukrainians and Supporters of Ukraine in the Czech Republic."