Václav Bláha

“Everyone received a scholarship after school. The kind that you get for three months, everyone got it. And then there was the creative scholarship, which was granted by the Fine Artists’ Fund or Union based on an assessment of your work. And I didn’t pass. I didn’t pass [the selection - trans.], so I didn’t get any scholarship. I wasn’t accepted into the Fine Artists’ Fund, I was merely registered and had to find myself a job. My dad helped me with that, so I became contract teacher at a secondary school. It was a whole new life. A big turning point at university was also that I married in my second-last year, so I started a family life that lasted seven years and produced one child.”

“And then came a pleasant surprise from the teaching staff, because they were asked to sign the Anti-Charter [a text denouncing Charter 77 by notable artists under state coercion - trans.]. They summoned us all to the staff room, the whole teaching staff. And the headmaster came in and started laying out all the sauce, that the Charter was [made by] some renegades and enemies of Socialism and that the Anti-Charter is being signed by all active citizens who disagree with the Charter, which is bad. Well, and I must say that the teaching staff refused it as one man or one woman. They said they wouldn’t sign it. That none ofthem had read or seen the Charter. That they should bring them the Charter, so they could read it, and then they would sign [the Anti-Charter]. But that was a Pyrrhic victory. When the headmaster found out what had happened, he went to his office and signed it for all of us. He took it on himself and wrote that the whole teaching staff is against the Charter, or whatnot. And that was that.”