The year 1963 was special, full of great events and subtle changes. For Americans it was the year they assassinated Kennedy, for the British it was the year of the "Great Train Robbery" and for Germans - at least some of them - it was the year Chancellor Adenauer retired.

In Europe this year begins with arctic winter. In Czechoslovakia, however, there is a sense of pre-spring in the air. The mood is changing and you can tell at every step. As if a huge energy was released and things started to happen.

Lemonade Joe is starting to be filmed on Barrandová. There are queues in front of the Semafor theater, books are being published that people are ripping from each other's hands. Karel Gott wins the Golden Nightingale survey, Jiří Štaidl writes There behind the water in the reeds. And the echoes of the madness unleashed by the Beatles in England penetrate us too.

Although people still have to laboriously find sand for dishes, the electricity is turned off and "meat-free days" are introduced in restaurants, but at the same time new housing estates and stadiums are being built. Karel Hubáček designs Ještěd, the blue mailboxes are changed to orange and the skirts are shortened.

238,092 children were born in Czechoslovakia this year. And this is how the world that surrounded them at that moment looked. There is something to remember.