Jiřina Dostálová

“After signing the Charter, when it became known, I was taken for the first series of interrogations. It’s true that I was suddenly surrounded by various odd types. At the time I worked at the library... I noticed people lounging about without borrowing anything. Then one colleague told me they were asking about me, so then it was clear they’re from the secret police and they’re watching me. Especially when it was 21 August or some anniversary, they even slept in front of our house, in front of the printer’s. They followed me to work in the morning, they sat there at work at the library the whole time, then they followed me back again. It was kind of strange. I stopped receiving letters, that is, letters would arrive after three weeks - when my mum wrote they’d come for a visit, I never found out in time because the letter would arrive three weeks later, postcards came after two weeks. It was all checked and recorded.”

“That was a time when things were really starting to happen. People were signing petitions, going on hunger strikes. I already saw things from a somewhat different perspective, I saw it as a path leading in another direction, that it’s something different, where something could actually happen, that there’s a power in it which is starting to frighten the comrades. If I support it, if we do something to help, there’ll be more of us, and something has got to happen. I gave birth to my daughter Terezka in Trutnov, and when she was still little, I thought about her future, what place I’d want her to grow up in... So after some discussions I decided to sign Charter 77.”

“I was in Hrádeček (the place of Havel’s cottage), but I never sat in Václav Havel’s kitchen. We saw each other many times, we debated, but never in his kitchen. We met in various flats in Trutnov. We knew each other. We met at the market, so we had some information about one another. Sometimes it was possible to go to a pub. But we were already being followed by then. We were under a terrible amount of surveillance. We came to Trutnov in ’86, and I signed the Charter the following year. I met Martin Věchet. He was on the the television a lot now when Havel died. He was a big friend of Václav Havel. So he got me in touch with Mr Havel, so that was a much closer contact, and things were discussed more deeply then. It was a bit different than when a person went to some protest or fought for things. It was more real. We organised chain hunger strikes, we met with the Independent Peace Association, there were more such organisations. Something was being done, was being written down. The activity was somehow bigger.”

“Then they came to interrogate me, they asked whether I’d signed it, said they knew about it, and asked why - the reasons. They had a very psychological approach. They tried. So that was the first thing. I knew then that they knew. And then the post. A postcard took two to three weeks to reach me, letters more than a month. The delivery time is two three days. They read everything. Nothing was normal any more. Or they would send me false letters. They would slip a letter under my door claiming there was some signing event, that I should apply there and there, or send something, some list, to such and such an address. And no one knew anything about it. Then the interrogations, those were one after the other. I always thought I was an inconspicuous person, but I guess I was a thorn in their side. I didn’t even realise it. I guess I was dangerous to them. I didn’t think so. I was only fighting for the truth. I saw that during the Velvet Revolution and we were on the main square in Trutnov that first evening. There were just a few of us there, a handful. We walked around the fountain with candles. That was the first time. That was peaceful. Then it was the second time, and people called at us to warn us that we were surrounded by undercover cops. I know that one man came up to me from the town council, he addressed me by name. There are thousands of people in Trutnov. He came up to me and said: ‘Mrs Rumlová, why are you doing this to us?’ I was called Rumlová at the time. It seemed strange to me. So they tried debating with us, but to no avail.”

“It was difficult. As Adventists, we didn’t go to work on Saturdays. That was probably the worst. There were penalties for that. My grandfather was given the worst job in the Třinec Ironworks, because he refused to go to work on Saturdays. Already as a child I noticed that something wasn’t right. That the communists were penalising my family because of our faith. Significantly. Dad had to work as a miner. I had a terribly clever sister who had all of the best marks at the grammar school in Český Těšín, but because she didn’t go to school on Saturdays, she had a three [the worst mark possible - transl.] from Behaviour. So she had all ones [top marks in all subjects - transl.], and a three in Behaviour, because her class teacher was a great “comrade”, I guess, and she never accepted that.”

“We had that one amazing teacher... it was in my third or fourth year [at secondary school], ’83 or ’84, there was a manifestation against imperialism, I think. I know that we had to join in. We made ourselves these huge posters, and we took a pram and put a missile into it, and a poster that said: Soviet missiles into every family. The teacher told us: ‘There’ll be trouble for this. They’ll lock us all up.”

“Those were the interrogations where they tried to find out where I got my information from about our future meeting places and plans etcetera. They put on the pressure. They tried to break you in various ways. So they promised, they praised, they threatened. And sometimes it was very hard. Then they started threatening that they’d take me daughter. That they’d put her in a children’s home - was it worth that to me, they asked. I knew that if they use this kind of pressure on me and I give in, it would be bad. I didn’t quite believe that they would really take her from me, but from what I found out later, they quite possibly could have. They were capable of doing that. But at the time I somehow... I told them no. That they would not gain any cooperation from me even in such a case. So that was very difficult for me.”

“Tereza was born in June. And this was in winter I think. She was a few months old. They came for me to my home and found out that I wasn’t there. Someone told them I was in the shop next door. It was December and I was wearing joggers. I had only skipped out in my slippers. They took me straight from the shop. I told them I had a small child at home. At the time, my husband was working at the printing office down the road - I said I had to tell him. One of them came with me, saying he had to guard the child, that they had to ask me something. I spent twelve hours at the interrogation that time. It was terrible. First of all, they took breaks, but I had to keep sitting on the chair and I wasn’t allowed to move the whole time. I only had a t-shirt on me, a coat, the joggers and the slippers, and I had woman problems to boot, and I couldn’t go anywhere. In the end they prepared some statement. I told them I wouldn’t sign it. We never signed interrogations. So get out, they said. So I went halfway across the town, my joggers drenched because of my problems. All the way through town. It was absolutely horrible. I thought to myself: what if I’m stopped by the police again, because they might see that as a reason to arrest me - dragging myself through the city in such a state. We had some acquaintances visiting, and when they saw me, they couldn’t understand why I did it. Why? For what reason? That was probably the most difficult interrogation I had. None of them were easy, but this one was the longest and the most demeaning.”