Josef Olšanský

"I started fixing up that house, and I know I was... and I'll never forget that in my life - that's the most beautiful thing I've ever experienced in my life, really, apart from the kids that were born, but that's on the same level too, because it affected my life for 50 years. I'm doing something in the bathroom and I was making a kind of a house... It wasn't at all like that Okal or that Šumperak model house. Big rooms, studio reaching up the ceiling and fireplaces. And all of a sudden, I had a light bulb in that bathroom and I was doing something in there and all of a sudden the door opened, it was in the evening. And suddenly I heard: 'Good evening, I'm Svatopluk Karásek, the new evangelical pastor. Does Pepa Olšanský live here? Can I come in?' And I said, 'Yes!' That's how I met Sváťa Karásek, and that love lasted fifty years. We changed each other's lives. At first, he used to say to me: 'Pop, the Rolling Stones, they're pop, they're idiots.' And then he called Mick Jagger the big-mouthed one, and I said, 'Love, fuck love.' He said, 'Love, it's not a grey-haired grandpa, dude, it's the heart, dude.' We complemented each other so well that we couldn't bear to be apart for those fifty years.

"At that time - 1969, October - October 27, I remember that. By that time Husák was already in power and it was going on. I was walking with a friend from the pub and we were living on the square in an block of flats - our parents, but my grandmother and grandfather had a house, which I then inherited from them. My grandmother died, then my grandfather lived. I worried him to death and I lived there alone. But we were walking from the pub with this one classmate who also listened to this stuff, and it was about 11 o'clock at night. By then they were hanging over the whole New Town, there's about a hectare square... Russian, Czech, Russian, Czech flag. They were all over the square. I jumped up, and as the tip of the Russian flag was hanging, I grabbed it - because Jarda was short and I was taller, so I jumped - I grabbed it and it snapped, the pole. So we jumped all over the square, and when we saw it the next day... how the Russian flags... how they were all broken and lying there... But somebody turned us in, so I got expelled from school. I wasn't of age yet, because it was October 27, and I was born on November 7, so otherwise I would have got three years. By that time I went to the punishment committee and the people's court, and there they were already shouting at me that "What dare I do this to the Soviet Union..."