"We met at Mucha's villa. Havel invited us there, saying that as a party and a government they had authorized the PEN club. And that they had to accept new people, and so all the people who were in Obsah were saying here for their friends from Obsah. They had some of the (Writers') Union there too, they were party people. Well, State Security made an assessment that who would have the main say there, that it would be Havel and Jungmann. Because Jungmann was the chairman, he was the editor-in-chief of the Literary Newspaper, and Havel was already such a leader. So they were rounded up and arrested. Now I had a meeting with Jungmann in Old Town Square and he still didn't go. I called his daughter, and she told me that he had left a long time ago. So I could see how it looks. I came to the Mucha´s villa, which is beautiful. And it was something quite incredible. It was the first meeting of the PEN Club. At seven o'clock, I don't know which one of the State Security officers said, 'Friends, let's agree to be here by seven o'clock. At seven o´clock we get up and go home. And Mucha's girlfriend, Mucha was away at the time, Marta Kadlečíková had a key to the villa, and she said, 'I'm the lady of the house and I'm not throwing any guests out. Whoever wants to, can leave whenever they want. But now there is no such term. You can stay here until midnight.' She just got so angry. It's just that those who were connected with State Security left at seven o'clock. And we stayed there. And a quarter of an hour later Havel came. And he said that they kept him in Čkalovka until seven o'clock."
"And now no one knew how to get at me. The one who turned it in was some former governess from Mariánské Lázně who suddenly wanted my job, which was so poorly paid. Well, she told the girls. Well, you see, you keep saying how much you like her and she's writing this about you behind your back. So that everybody knows about you.' And the shame... and the shame that the kids would share with me. And that's what set them off, and those girls started to hate me. That great love turned into great hate, and I was really useless. They kept doing mean things to me. Suddenly, I was the one blamed for their fate. Now everyone was saying they’d write to their parents, that I was on duty on Sunday, and just wait — "my dad will beat you up, my dad will break your nose." Some of them were Roma girls, and I started to get scared. So I went to tell our deputy principal, and the whole town knew about it. Everyone thought they could treat me badly — the lady at the post office, the woman at the dairy. And when I told the deputy principal, he said: “Look, you know what? You caused this mess, so you stay here. And you deal with the parents yourself.” And those girls were all looking forward to it. They were excited for revenge, that this time it wouldn't be their parents who got beaten up, but me. So I spent that Sunday there. And I felt terribly sorry for those girls, because not a single one of their parents showed up.
"These people, the later socialist realism crowd, who fucked up — they actually started off well. That was Ivan Olbracht, Marie Majerová, Marie Pujmanová. Their early works, especially Majerová’s and Pujmanová’s, were beautiful. And then the writing became didactic, and they all fell into socialist realism. And that’s what I’m afraid of, because I’ve already heard young authors say that everything written today is about the 1940s, but that there should also be a book, say, about a grandma who can’t afford a bread roll. And I said: ‘Now we’re back in socialist realism.’ Back then, literature was given assignments. First, it had to be about miners, then about factory workers. I remember someone writing in Literární noviny about walking through the city at night and seeing a drunk worker passed out in the street... and they said the main character had to be a positive hero. He wrote that he saw the drunk worker and started wondering whether he was a positive or negative hero. The idea of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ heroes lasted for a very long time. If someone was a so-called negative hero, we immediately knew — oh, he’s probably the child of a former bourgeois family, or has shady connections to the West. And then came the next thing: they were saying literature was forgetting about farmers. So one of my artist friends told me she’d paint my portrait — I was a student at the time, a university student — and she said, ‘I’ll label it “girl from agriculture.”’ The cultural centers in villages had just gotten some funding, and she figured someone would buy it, and she’d make a bit of money. That’s just what the culture looked like back then, and I’m worried it might all collapse like that again today."
"I was actually getting to know the map of Prague by what was burning where. And suddenly I had the idea, probably it was also the air pressure, to turn around. And a building fell down in front of my eyes. It was a time bomb. The house where my friend lived fell. She was also one of the 'children of Vyšehrad.' Well, I cried that it killed Gerta. It didn't kill Gerta, she was in kindergarten, her parents were at work, but I didn't find out until later. And it was a big shock to me. And then we came out when the war was over, first the Revolutionary Guards came. They had RG signs on their arms, and they were also called looting guards. And we, when we were in the basement, there was like a door, the houses were connected by one brick wall. And they would go and dig through it so that we could get through if we needed to. Because it was said that there were drunken Vlasov men in the Court Square (note: this is a mistake, they meant SS members) and that they were gouging out the eyes of children. Well, it wasn't exactly true. As they said then, Pankrác was saved by the Vlasov people. So we used to visit like that with the children from the neighbouring house. It was an event after all. Suddenly a soldier came there in our uniform, it was said that it was a Czech uniform. He had it hidden at home. And he said, the Russians are here. And there was still shooting outside. We had boxes of sand in front of the house, there were boxes of sand in the basement, and we got one hit there. They shot a man in front of our house. And then there was a door in our passage where mothers would stop and say, 'Poor Weil, I wonder what happened to them,' and I said, 'Who were the Weils?' They lived here and they had to go to Germany to work. Why? Because they were Jews and Jews had to go to Germany to work. There was a dentist who moved in, and he said this is what the Weils have here when they come back. And they were still looking forward to the Weils. And he didn't have any of that family come back."
Jana Červenková, maiden name Salačová, was born on January 18, 1939 in Prague. She spent her childhood and adolescence in the Pankrác district of Prague. Even as a child she was very sensitive to the war. She remembers the great air raid on Prague in February 1945 and some events during the Prague Uprising. At the end of the war, the Pankrác district became one of the main centres of fighting. Just after the war, as a six year old, she was present at the funeral of the victims of the fighting on the then Court Square (now Náměstí hrdinů). In September 1945, the public execution of the Protectorate Deputy Mayor of Prague, the Nazi Josef Pfitzner, took place at the same place. After the war, she began attending the St. Anne’s Church School in Ječná Street, and after its dissolution in 1948 she transferred to the state school. She graduated from the then eleven-year school and subsequently graduated from the College of Education. After graduating, she went to teach in the borderlands, where she realized the bleak conditions in which children in orphanages lived. In addition to being a primary school teacher, she became a governess in an orphanage and then dealt with her experiences in her first novels. In all of her books, she opened up taboo topics, often incompatible with the socialist morality proclaimed at the time. Almost none of her books were published during the previous regime. Her husband was Miroslav Červenka, a poet and literary scientist who was not allowed to publish, teach or do scientific work during the so-called normalisation. At the end of the 1960s, she worked as a lecturer at the Mladá fronta publishing house, and in later years she could only be employed as a cleaner, janitor or assistant teacher. At that time, she began to associate with a number of prominent figures from dissent, lending her name to some banned authors. She herself contributed to the samizdat magazine Óbsah. In August 1989 she became a member of the PEN Club, and in November 1989 one of the founding members of the Civic Forum. A little later she was elected chair of the Committee for Imprisoned Writers at the Czech PEN Club. From 1990 she worked as an editor of Literární noviny, later at Mosty magazine and Prostor newspaper. In 1999 she won the Tom Stoppard Prize for her novel The Diving Course. Between 2013 and 2018 she worked for Post Bellum.
