Michael Žantovský

"I was expelled from grammar school in my first year. I was attending a grammar school, then the Secondary General Education School, on Velvarská, now Evropská Street. Because I was the "smart one", I was already doing school theatre at the age of 14. The so-called Theater in the Basement, which was in the basement of the Central Army House in the Dejvické Square, where I think the officers' club is today, or something like that. It was just a very interesting little theatre in those days. There were a lot of events like that, Jirka Černý used to be a DJ there there. And we had a school theatre, which I, immediately when I got admitted to the school, I joined. First we did some Shakespeare, which I didn't think was modern enough. So I took it up and started staging a Beatniks´ (Beat Generation authors´) poetry that was starting to come to us: Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and so on. And I was living it completely, and I could already see myself as a future director and actor. We were preparing, rehearsing. But, what the hell did not happen? Allen Ginsberg came to Prague. We went to see him at Viola and he drew us a fish and it was just amazing and he was reading Howl at the Faculty of Arts at the time and it was just breathtaking. And then they voted him King of Majáles [students May celebration]. And then he was expelled from Czechoslovakia. Because, according to the communist authorities, he had been allegedly seducing underage boys to some games. At that time we had already rehearsed everything and Honza Zábrana gave me unpublished translations of Ginsberg, which we were read there and so on. And our school headmistress, who was a convinced communist, although three years later she also became a reformer, I think, put it all together and simply realized that our theatre rehearsals in the little theatre and everything we were doing were just a cover for some apparently homosexual orgies and so on. And I was just kicked out of that school. Parents not wanting me there and so on. So I failed in my theatre career. And fortunately my sister, who unlike me was a model student all her life, a pupil and everybody praised her and so on, so she was studying at the Gymnázium [grammar school] Na Dlouhém lánu, today it's the Gymnázium Arabská. And there they took pity on me, on the renegade, and they admitted me there, and somehow I made it to graduation."

"It meant that I had a job for which I was paid and that I would go... I was gathering the latest news from that time, both official news... At that time, at the Government Office, the then spokesman for Prime Minister Adamec's government, Mr Pavel, would sometimes hold some press conferences, so I would go there to ask intrusive questions. But I also had channels and relations or contacts with the unofficial opposition leaders, and I also wrote about that, or we wrote the bigger stories together with my colleague Michael Weiss, who would came from Vienna. But the main thing that my work consisted of - in 1988 and especially 1989 - was running up and down Wenceslas Square, avoiding truncheons and writing about what had just happened that day. I like to recall it, because I say that I never had such a physical condition in my life as that year. And of course it was touch-and-go at times. But we were part of a group of foreign correspondents, and in our group was especially important Jolyon Naegele, the Voice of America correspondent at the time, who still lives in Prague. He was important because he had a transistor radio. We all had that, but unlike us, he also had a very short wavelength frequency on that transistor radio, which was used by the police. So we could listen to the cops. Of course, they were speaking in coded language, but not that complicated, so after a while we knew very well that if we heard 'we are going to the stadium', the stadium was Wenceslas Square, and we knew that we had to retreat to some place where we could possibly get out from. And we were a little bit prepared for them."