Ladislav Matějček

"I grew up in a completely Masaryk family, so even my parents forbade me to join the Pioneer at that time, which annoyed me, because everybody went to the Pioneer, and there was a whole class in the Pioneer, and suddenly I wasn't allowed, and so I was kind of weird. So I got interested in it, but I shared those views of my parents and I was like, because the whole family was like that. And I didn't really notice that we were stuck up anymore, because I had enough extracurricular interests or a lot of interests, so I didn't like... I didn't miss that traveling abroad that much yet. We were listening to some Radio Luxembourg, which they were jamming, but it seemed to me that it was a kind of coloring, that just good stuff was forbidden, that it was natural. We used to get books sort of on the cheap, I don't know, there were some books about the hippie movement that you couldn't just get in bookstores, and we got hold of them somehow. Well, but here I would say an interesting experience. I then in high school, as I had friends, we were kind of a group of four. We all had long hair, we were all Máničky (young people with long hair, disagreeing with communism), it was a strange type as people, a certain resistance or defiance against some official culture. And one of those good friends of mine grew up in an explicitly communist family, but they were honest communists. Parents were terribly nice, when we came to their house, his mother always gave us a bun with salami, we were happy, and they were talking to us nicely. How poor they were, how they worked at Baťa, and they weren't some active communists, that they had a career as communists, but they had that confidence. And this Ivoš started explaining to me the left-wing ideas of equality of all people. And it was so strong that I had to somehow struggle with that ideology."