Václav Lebduška

"We made a frame. Or some handy carpenter made us a frame. According to a manual from Poland. We stretched a membrane over the frame, ran a photographic roller over it and printed. It was tedious work. We did it in the attic of the mill in Třemošnice. This is the neighbouring village where František Novotný lived. We always spent one Saturday there. We were covered in paint, sometimes it was illegible, but I think we made about sixty to a hundred copies. Something like that amount. Then, when November came and we knew we didn't have to do it anymore, we were relieved. It was really tiring, but we took it as our mission."

- "Did you somehow at that time, in '88 or '89, suspect that it wouldn't last much longer? Tell me, please, how did you experience that?" - "We had no idea. It seemed to us that the system... I would call it a happy ghetto. Prague was a strange community of people who lived in relative freedom within that system. But I didn't have a vision of its end. We even went to a festival in Wroclaw just before the fall of the regime, where there were supposed to be folk singers. But they wouldn't let us go, of course. That was just before the end, but we went back and thought it's screwed. It's gonna stay like this forever... We adapted to the conditions and tried to fight the system. But it didn't occur to me that it was possible it would be over in two months. In fact, I didn't even think about it when the East Germans started to flee. The beast still seemed to have solid legs. But they were actually very wobbly."

"My friends and I from the village did not join the Independent Peace Association. Although Tomáš tempted us. I feel that we were perceived a bit as peasants in the dissent. We were a different category for them. I know that Hana Marvanová, who was a co-founder of the Independent Peace Association, was even supposed to say once - my friend Fido still remembers it - 'What are those farmers doing here?' or something like that. At some event. At a film screening or something. We wore green camis. I guess we were really rural for them. We had a different mindset. Not so complicated. And at the same time, we have gone through military service, which they were afraid of. But we were over it. For us, some of those things sounded like we did agree with them, but it wasn't that important to us. I guess."

"Villages were losing their traditional form. Or maybe they have lost it long ago. People were rebuilding the original houses, farmhouses and cottages. Except for individuals who bought cottages for recreation and kept them in their traditional form. There were about two of them in Závratec. The rest were rebuilt into socialist houses. Bircholite plaster. That rustic baroque completely disappeared. Gates gone. Replaced by some iron gates. I'm talking about my family home, which has also suffered from it. Old furniture was thrown out. Instead – umakart. The landscape got impacted in the same spirit. Fields sprayed with chemicals. My father was a hunter. When I used to go hunting with him in the '70s, there was a lot of game. Then there was a cut, and suddenly only three pheasants would be shot within the whole hunt. The game disappeared. A chemically devastated landscape, and here and there, the remnants of big old farmhouses were slowly falling apart. Roofs were caving in. Of course, I don't remember if I perceived it as a symbol of extinction at the time. Some kind of transition from one form to another. Depressively perceived."