Vlastimil Ježek

“It was around my third year at grammar school. I had already started listening to foreign radio, and I heard from the broadcast that they’d arrested Dana Němcová. I remembered her as a kind, intelligent lady, who used to visit us at the summer camps and tell us interesting things and who hardly looked like an enemy of the state. I just couldn’t get it, and it even led me to make one desparate act, which was foiled by my class teacher, luckily. I wrote a funny letter, that I’m quitting the Union of Socialist Youth because I don’t understand how they could lock up such a lady. I delivered it proudly to the class chairman [of the USY - trans.], and he luckily handed my attempt at a protest to our class teacher, the chemist Krupka. Krupka then spent the next week explaining to me how awful it is to have to teach at grammar school as a scientist, just because he disagreed with the arrival of Soviet forces. That was awfully interesting. He didn’t tell me what to do, but his story led me to take the letter back at the end of the week. I’m actually glad it worked out like that, because if my classmate had sent it upwards, I think I wouldn’t have coped at my age of seventeen.”

“The word perestroika really was like a red rag. Starting from the second or perhaps the beginning of the third year, I tried to organise a noticeboard newspaper, which simply meant that I looked for interesting articles, which I cut out or copied and pinned to the noticeboard, and [the other side - trans.] took them off again. It was a kind of battle, especially with three teaching assistants, Rzounek’s flunkeys. The fastest and most frequent to go were texts in Russian regarding the perestroika, they really hated those the most. The way they explained it was that we really couldn’t compare it with our situation, that the Soviet Union had completely different, specific problems. We found that funny because ‘our paragon the Soviet Union’ and ‘with the Soviet Union for all eternity’ [classic Communist slogans - trans.] suddenly didn’t apply. The perestroika in the Soviet Union was something that we were certainly not supposed to repeat. They didn’t like it, they didn’t speak of it. They knew full well that it was the beginning of their end.”

“My first wife was eight month with child back then in November, and of course she refused to stay at home, so it was a double emotional experience, starting with Albertov and that feeling of freedom, which suddenly spread from the nearest vicinity to an almost boundless space. It seems like a strange cliché now, but at the time, when you saw all those queer people around who controlled the state, and suddenly in that gathering you saw people around you - the estimates vary from five to fifty thousant, although there were no doubt a lot of stetsecs [State Security agents - trans.] there - the way those people looked, their faces, how they smiled, what they said, the signboards they held over their heads, it was a completely different world. It was an amazing feeling, including the march to Vyšehrad. The second type of experience was all the slogans the people in the procession were able to come up with, how human a language they used. I guess the most interesting experience for me was one moment down by the river, when an old lady leaned out of a window, merrily waving small state flags, and the procession chanted: ‘Long live grandma!’ After witnessing the May Day parades in Letná, with all those slogans and annoyed faces of people, ninety per cent of whom didn’t want to be there or were afraid not to be there, it was a great relief. The third experience was joy from the fact that me and my wife, who was tired, didn’t carry on to National Avenue - I doubt we would have had that child - but we went home instead. The fourth experience was that many of our classmates and friends, who had suffered under the batons in National Avenue, ended up in our place, in the open flat on the corner of Dlouhá Street and Old Town Square. It was a shock, how it all messed up so strangely. It was a kind of accelerated reaction - like the hopes of Škroupa Square and then months later Palach Week - but this time it was immediate - an afternoon of freedom followed by a rough evening.”