Rudolf Bělohoubek

(question) “What did you feel (in November 1989), what did it mean to you?” “Well, things loosened up...” (question) “Did you expect what happened in 1989? Or did you think that…” “Well, I saw the whole thing as, I saw it as a continuation of 1968. I didn‘t expect it per se, just from how I used to visit my aunt in Germany, right, so I had some information from Germany about various changes. I was waiting to see if things would loosen up or if they wouldn‘t loosen up. Because there was political tension, all around there was political tension. I wasn‘t active in any, you know, but I just checked out a few articles now and then, to see what was going on, right, well, and importantly – I just cheered for Gorbachev. He was the biggest chess master, right, he check-mated the Soviet Union and pushed it to its knees, so. And that‘s how it all… speeded up.” (question) “When you think back on it after these twenty years, were your expectations fulfilled?” “I didn‘t expect anything as such, no expectations. I didn‘t have any pre-formed ideas of what was going to happen next. How it goes is how it goes. That‘s history. I didn‘t affect it in any way. Certainly not.”

“The teacher told the class that there’s a mouse in the school. The mouse was eating everything it found except for metallic parts – mice eat paper as well. I had to stop hunting mice so I went somewhere else for hunting. I had to hunt mice on the shooting grounds and fairs etc. They went for lunch and the mouse came and ate everything it could find and after that it disappeared again.”

“They don’t know about it, I’ve never told them what happened. I didn’t want to traumatize them. It suffices that I have to bear it for the rest of my life. Time goes by.”

Expired long time and came 15th březen 1939th.Do zou want to know what the weather? Snowing and raining. Germans at 4 o'clock in the morning standing in the yard. My father looked away and said: 'Oh. Germans. War! This is the end."

“So I was accompanying them, I went alongside them and then a turmoil broke out, there was a mob of people and they were beating us. One of General Vlasov’s men threw a bag at me, it was a similar bag like this. One woman said: “He’s a German, shoot him.” I don’t know which one it was but it must have been one of them, this didn’t come out of nowhere. Well, then I just turned around and went home. I didn’t pay any more attention to it. You only realize after years what actually had happened that day, I haven’t told my sister nor my brother about this incident.”

“There are certain things in this life that I try to avoid searching for because I consider them to be useless. You can’t bring dead back to life. No doctor can do that. It’s just in a historical sense that you can elevate the dead. Besides that I don’t see any purpose in this. I came in the fifties to Beroun and asked at the funeral office where my parents had been buried. They told me that they are buried on a graveyard in Vráž. I never went there and always tried to evade that place because it would only fill my heart with a desire for revenge. You know what revengefulness is? It can make you do anything. Anything that burns can be burned down. That’s why I always avoided these things. Therefore I’m still here today. If I went down the path of revenge I don’t know where I’d have been today.”

“There was no interest on behalf of my siblings to see each other. Everybody followed his own path individually. All we knew was that we were brothers and sisters, that was it. Just the authorities cared about our common origin, but everybody kept their privacy.”

Do you want a cigarette? You smoke? You don’t smoke? Do you love? I love, too. Do you know what? Freedom.”