Gustav Oplustil

"I came up with the idea that I wanted it same as Jaroslav Ježek did, and now the conductor came and said: 'Don't you think saxophones will play here?' I said: 'Well, saxophones, of course they will play there. Trumpets, trombones, saxophones, that is jazz music. 'He said: 'Saxophone - a bourgeois instrument! We won't say that - a bourgeois instrument!' I said: 'Well, they can't play the balalaika, because it's a completely different music, and we need to take into account the people who sit as listeners and spectators.' Well so it was agreed and I played it and I got it, I was no longer an instructor, but suddenly I was a director in an army theatre and I was there until 1958, when it ceased to be an army theatre, because Čepička ended up, and it was the Vinohrady theatre again."

"It simply came to our notice then. One was dense. American planes arrived first. They drew a smokescreen in the sky, where they made it as if it was on the train rails; there was a wheel, it was like a station, and they still had it exactly calculated. But it may not have been counted, or miscalculated, that when a wind came, it shifted. And when the planes arrived, the dumb pilot did not know if it was over Germany, or if he was already in Bohemia, or in Moravia, or whereabouts. He was allowed to do so and threw the bombs as they were. So it also affected people who were in the open air and had no idea that a bomb could fall on them, and the barracks took it away. During this bombing, my brother, the one that goes to see. We were hidden in the basement and he ran out into the yard and climbed the shed to see what the division looked like. That was pretty stupid, of course. But suddenly a bomb fell, it swept him away, it flew out of it with that pressure [wave], the compressed air, it swept him away, and down on his four he crawled back into the cellar and didn't get out. Nothing happened to him, but it was those conditions that were just bad."