Ondřej Fibich

"We used to publish interesting things there [in a samizdat magazine at the grammar school] that were not common at that time. Miloslav Topinka was to publish a collection called Rat's Nest and my classmate, who happened to be the son of the Minister of Health, Jarda Prokopec... Sometimes these samizdat, not samizdat, banned things were circulated among the communist prominent leaders. They read it for fun, because The Rat's Nest sounded a bit decadent, so the printing copies circulated. So from those test copies that Jarinek brought us, we just rewrote the whole collection into that issue. Or a friend of ours was very good at English - Michal Ditrich, a big beat player and later bassist of Abraxas Michal Dittrich - he translated a lot of English and American stuff, so we had stuff about hippies and Bob Dylan lyrics."

"We then went into exile in Vienna for a few months, where we experienced such an hesitation whether to stay there or return. And when we came back, of course the cage fell down and my parents were out of work for a couple of years. It was quite difficult to find one, so they were constantly threatened with the paragraph [on social parasitism] because everybody had to have a stamp [work certificate] in their ID. I had the problem that I couldn't get into any grammar school at all. In the end it turned out in an interesting way, because at that time in Vysočany there was this last right-wing revisionist headmaster - before they nmanaged to replace him - who in 1969 accepted all these problematic kids who had some kind of a problem because of their parents. So there were various big-beat musicians and children of emigrants who went to school with me, like Martin Schulz, whose daddy was already reporting from Free Europe at that time. I think it was an excellent group because we stuck together there in a way that we didn't do compromises, which was amazing. And I think all those people were very inspiring, and of course I still associate with some of them to this day."