Hynek Krátký

"When we arrived [from a holiday in the country], my parents very strongly warned us not to go into the front room at all, the living room, which faced the park, facing south. Because the whole park was swarming with Russian soldiers, that was one of the encampments they had made in Prague. I don't know how many places like that there were in Prague, but because it's a big area, there were military tents, military vehicles up to the horizon. I remember that the street Tomanova was rutted, the asphalt was rutted by tank tracks, and that there were tanks standing a few tens of metres in front of our house, with their turrets turned just towards that residential area. "

"Trains going to Všetaty stop at the Prague-Vysočany railway station. I was going to Prague-Vysočany and suddenly I see - five minutes before the train arrived, policemen with dogs came and picked up everybody. Just everybody, old women with suitcases, they didn´t care, they just cleared the whole platform, everybody had to get on the bus, you're all arrested, everybody from this platform is arrested. They took us to the police station, there they gathered us in one place. They just picked up the whole railway station, as nervous as they were, with dogs. And now they interrogated us there and let us go in the afternoon. Well, why am I saying this? That was Saturday, then Sunday, and then it was Monday. And on Monday, 'You're supposed to go to the headmistress.' And she said, 'Well, I have a report here. What were you doing on Saturday at the Prague-Vysočany station?' That was a stupid question all right. 'I don't know what I was doing there. I was on my way to see a friend.' - 'It says here that you were arrested.' - 'That's true, but I don't know why.' I was playing stupid in the situation, and I think most people did, that nobody told [the truth]. Yes, I could have said, 'Yeah, I was going to Všetaty, I went to commemorate Jan Palach.'"

"Now we were going and we were heading to Máj [department store, trans.] and I wondered...Well, it was Saturday, no, it was Friday, it was Friday in Prague then, so again it wasn't completely unusual, but it was strange - there was not a single living soul. So we were going with Jirka Weiner and we were walking on the right side. We came around that corner, or rather we were approaching that corner, and I know that we were quite surprised, because suddenly a heavily armed man with a white helmet, if you know it from the pictures, with a baton, came running out from around that corner, and behind him a second one, and behind him a third one, and suddenly where there had been nothing, right in front of us they suddenly came running out and started closing the whole road there. And they let us go, there were two of us. We went through, and in Spálená we saw that all the cars that we had seen on the embankment before were lined up here and... and there were hundreds of policemen, or it seemed to us that there were a lot of them. We were like, 'Wow, they closed it off, how come we're not on the other side.'"

"I came there, there were two guys in plain clothes, not in uniforms. Today I know it was State Security, I hadn't known what it was until then, I didn't know it worked at all. And they sat me down - and the first question already got me: 'So, Comrade Krátký, do you know why you are here?' - 'How should I know? I don't know.' - 'Then tell us what happened on the eighth of May before the holidays.' - 'On the eighth of May? On the eighth of May... Yeah, that was our farewell event at school, the last bell.' - 'Right, so tell us about it.' And now I was thinking, 'Oh my.' It was a real shock to me, a 19-year-old boy..., so I don't remember much. All I know is that they were playing this tactic on me that I've since learned about, that there is one good guy and one bad guy. And it was very unpleasant because it lasted about three hours, the interrogation, and I came out of there and I was pretty much broken down, not that I would physically break down, but I was like, I can't trust anybody anymore."

"So I got on an intercity bus at Hradčanská station to go to Lány. The bus was crammed, so I thought: 'It's good that it's crammed, but it's only one bus...?' The bus was crowded and I was standing behind a man. I was alone and these people obviously knew each other and were talking to each other. And it was only later that I realised that the person sitting in front of me was Václav Havel and that the people around me, they werethe Charter 77 signatories. So we arrived in Lány, we got off and I thought, 'Wow, really, just one bus, I thought there would be crowds of people here.' So I felt embarrassed and I went with those people and now gradually... And there were people who arrived in cars, but they were just taking photos and filming us. So I went with the crowd and I was like, 'Oh, but now I'm in this group again.' So I went with the group and I thought, 'So what? I'm going to celebrate or commemorate the first president. That can´t be so wrong.'"