Ivan Binar

"At the time when State Security was watching me, I was writing Reconstruction, a novel about prison, which is based on my personal experience, and its content corresponds to reality. I used to put the finished pages into a siphon bottle, which I kept in my closet, and when the bottle was full, I entrusted the sheets to a friend and continued writing. During the interrogation, the State Security officers began to read whole passages from the novel to me, quoting various profanities, one of them moralizing and saying: 'I would forbid my children to read such filth!' Then I learned that I was bugged 24 hours a day at home. Another time, I was ostentatiously followed in Prague - it lasted three days. The agents didn't hide. They came after me. Petr Uhl then said to me at the station: 'Yes, I know all these gentlemen.'"

"My wife, Jarka, went with the children to Vlkovice to her parents. We walked her to the bus station, and right when the bus left, the whole State Security class stuck to us. It was something unreal! We ran, and they ran after us. We fled to the Art House for an exhibition, where we had peace and hoped we got rid of them. But we didn't: we got out, and they were right back at us. They chased us up in all sorts of ways. It went on all afternoon, and they chased us until the evening. This stalking was meant to frighten - you wouldn't notice normal stalking."

“I learned about the text of the “Charta” from Radio Free Europe. This was in a way funny because at that time, I worked at a power plant. I was a worker at the water treatment station and together with the other workers we bought a tiny radio to listen to Radio Free Europe broadcasts during our night shifts. In one of those broadcasts they presented the text of the Charta 77 and I remember that I was angry that I hadn’t learned about the Charta before. Although I was visiting Prague every now and then no one told me about it and it was only in January that I learned about it from the radio. I then got the document… no, actually I signed it blank, I signed that I agree with the text of the Charta. I think that Ludvík Kavín or someone went to Prague and took it then with him. He then gave it to somebody here. So I was only in the second row of those who signed the Charta.”

“There was a moment at the secret state police station when they interrogated me and told me that they had collected enough material on me to lock me up for ages. They were so persuasive that I came to believe them and I imagined how by the time I’d get out of jail my kids would be grown-ups. At that grave moment, God stood by me. I told them: ‘In that case I’d like to make a phone call to my wife and tell her that I’m not coming home tonight, so that she won’t end up running around town and looking for me like last time when you arrested me and nobody told her about my whereabouts’. After this they just told me to go home. They had been bluffing! But at that dreadful moment, God really stood by me because I could have easily given in and told them: ‘Ok, I’ll be good and cooperate with you’. Therefore I’m not judging those people who cooperated in a certain situation so strictly. It was hard to resist in certain situations, I mean when they were threatening you with long sentences and jail. They had a lot of information about most everyone and they were very good at perfidiously exploiting that information to their advantage.”

“We did a play by Adolf Hoffmeister, it was called “The Bride”. We also performed a little play by Luděk Nekuda. We played these two pieces in Liege, Belgium at a theater festival and then in Nancy, France. It was in 1967 and it was a complete failure. The biggest success story was the Leningrad ensemble that was kicking capitalism’s butt there. It was almost on the turn to 1968 but that period was completely different in France then in Czechoslovakia. The sentiment in France at that time was very much leftist and we were too far on the right for them. The Hofmeister piece we played there was an avant-garde play from the First Czechoslovak Republic and it was completely out of place in the context of that festival. Nevertheless that didn’t matter at all to me because the important thing was that we had gotten out of Czechoslovakia. It was the first time I got to the West. It was a great cultural shock for me and I never really recovered from it. It was amazing to see that there is something as the western style of living with all that goes with it. It was simply beautiful. Then we returned home into our Bolshevik misery.”

“We mostly played original pieces. Usually, the author was Pavel Veselý and Luďek Nekuda, and Pavel or Edvard Schiffauer did the music. He then chose it as his profession for life – he studied songwriting and became a professional music composer. He’s still teaching composition at the Music Academy in Ostrava. So it was a beautiful, inspiring and creative time for us. We were all more or less into fine arts and there was not much else left to do as the official artistic life and magazines were controlled by an older generation of Communist artists. They wouldn’t let us in and neither did we want to go this way. We were happy with our theater – it was our life and a great satisfaction. I’m sometimes really wondering how we managed to finish our studies.”

“It was an interesting story but as it was on the list of required reading, we were making ourselves laugh about it. So when the boys started to write that musical based on the novel “Son of The Regiment” in spring 1968, it was a bit of a joke. At the same time, Peťka Podhrázký somehow got the chance to go to Mongolia for a summer job. He left for Mongolia in the early summer and experienced Mongolia’s occupation by foreign troops. He completed the musical based on his experiences with the occupation. It was composed of four acts and the last two acts were written in Mongolian. When he brought it back it was clear that it was directed against the occupation. So we adopted it with great pleasure. Petr Ullmann became the playwright and directed the play, which premiered on 1 April 1949 in the Theatre of Music in Ostrava. It was a major success which, of course, was because of its theme and mostly because of the time. But also important was that the play was funny.”