Pavel Baldinský

"When the State Security investigated me, they set it up as I mentioned. That it wasn't a workers' initiative - internal to the company... but that it was an external pamphlet that denigrated the work of others. And they pulled one thing on me that I didn't realize. Yes, I knew that something was going on, but I didn't put it in context at all, so I was very surprised that they said to me: 'You're setting up a Polish-style union!' That's what the one who got angry with me said. At first he thought it was a lie, so I quickly recovered and reacted. But it was new to me. To set up a trade union on the Polish model, yes, it was such a topical thing for the party and of course the whole structure of the State Security or the security service that I didn't even think of it..."

"After ten years or so at the Transport Company, when I was a driver and wanted to leave, and because I perceived the situation around me in the company as it was, I wrote the Workers' Petition, which was a kind of elaboration, a legal loop. I surrounded myself with literature that I copied it from, not that I'm that much of a lawyer, but I thought, yeah, this fits. And it turned into this kind of a paper, yeah, and I got 200 drivers to sign it, which was a big trouble. But I did the thing that I hid the 200 signatures, I separated it from the actual file, and when the State Security, the State Security, came in and wanted to know, they took me - we're on the subject you asked - they took me and they wanted to know, first of all, where the signatures were, which people had signed it. Because every driver has a service number assigned by the Transport Company, and even if he scribbled his name wrong, he can be identified by that number, and that's what they were interested in. And in Bartolomějská was investigated for that. I took it as a chess game, but I had a tight ass, that's clear, I was afraid, it's a natural thing, fear is a natural thing. So was I, but I didn't want to lose, I wanted to come out victorious. And so I put it on, when they asked where the signatures were, I said, 'Comrades...' - I learned to say 'comrades', I hadn't let it out of my mouth until then, out of my mouth then - and I said, 'Comrades, I don't understand. You are in a position where you are protecting the working class, and you are interested in the signatures, but you are not at all interested in what the working class writes, what the contents of the file are.' So again, they couldn't deny it, but they were very interested, but I hid it so that I couldn't find it for a long time afterwards."

"Actually, in the eighties, well, in the eighties, that is 1975-1980 and maybe even earlier, we were members of the underground church. Because the church as such could not work in many things publicly, so a structure was created that was under that official structure. We pretended to be normal, but then maybe we were still studying completely outside of that, so I, for example, studied theology for six years with people who were not allowed by the state, didn't have the so-called state approval, and so on. There were more of us, there were more of these groups, they weren't interconnected, they didn't know about each other, they worked separately. And in connection with that, of course, literature was imported. There was always information being exported from the Czech Republic to abroad and back, because that was the way of life, that's how things were published. And I was involved in that. So when the books arrived, it was usually brought by some foreigner in some car, the car... handed over the keys here, unfortunately it was a big 'america', so it attracted attention, or in the wrong places, like Wenceslas Square by the hotel, so it wasn't very wise, but I just took the car away, took all the books out of it, they smelled a bit of petrol, and I put other information in there, closed it, and the person took it and went back to the country where he came from. So this is what it looked like, it took this form. Then the books went their own ways, of course, their own channels, again, different people did that."