Helena Bartíková

"That actually led to 1989, because in the meantime you experienced a lot of things that shaped you and you started to look at the world around you more critically. It was strange, for example, that we couldn't play the games we wanted to play, they wouldn't allow us to play them. And it just led to the fact that by 1989 I was really looking at things differently. I was still very much influenced by it, and in 1986, after some vicissitudes, my family and I came back to Prague and I joined Supraphon. And that Supraphon was actually again - the floor where I worked was the art department, the art department. And again, there were people who were... really their views were more or less anti-regime. So it was not surprising that in June 1989, when Charter 77 published the petition Several Sentences, sometime in July, sometime before the celebration of Karel Gott's fiftieth birthday, which we then went to, that I met with the possibility of one of my colleagues and friends, Jana Jandová, the wife of Petr Janda, the first wife of... we used to visit each other as colleagues from that art department. Sometimes they would stay with us, sometimes we would stay with another colleague, and then we would stay with this Jana Jandová. Miloš Zapletal lived next door to the Jandas, and that's where Petr Janda met, and I think Michael Kocáb as well. Apparently they were discussing the petition Several Sentences. And they actually told us not to do anything stupid and to see what we could read and possibly sign. We all read it there, and not one of the few sentences seemed like we weren't behind it. So we signed it. The fact is that we knew there could be complications, that it was still a time when really both the Communists and the police were after people who signed the Few Sentences. They had problems at work and so on. But we signed anyway. It happened that only one colleague, who was a single mother at that time, withdrew her signature the next day. She was terribly afraid that the police would come and take her away and there would be a four-year-old girl left home alone. So that's when I signed Several Sentences."