Věra Dvořáková

“Either on Saturday 18 November or on Sunday 19 November my dad was leaving for a meeting at the ‘Circle of Independent Intelligentsia’. At that moment when he closed the apartment door I managed to catch the Free Europe broadcast. On the radio they warned all members of the Circle since the meeting point was revealed and that the police was awaiting the participants. I remember starting to panic – my dad was over sixty years old and I got really scared that he would get locked up or beaten. The image of someone touching my dad – an Auschwitz survivor – was horrible. I could not but wait. And he wasn’t coming back for a long time. The participants really were arrested but then they released them. My father spent a night at the police, returned home in the morning, laughed and said: ‘I will probably become famous because the last who get locked up when regimes are falling, will enter history textbooks.’”

“When I came to see my father at the railway station for the first time, he was just picking up the phone. Tears got into my eyes because I saw him lecturing in a crammed lecture hall at Bochum University and saw him travelling throughout Germany to help students. Suddenly, he was lifting the train barriers and answered as ‘Number two’. And he told me: ‘What’s up? What is going on?’ I replied: ‘Dad, this is horrible, so many students had listened to you, holding their breaths and now you lift the barriers!’ He gave me that look and said: ‘You know, as long as life is not at stake, it doesn’t really matter.’ He lifted the barriers and went on. I remained standing there in shock and even today tears creep into my eyes just remembering it.”

“At the time of the trial of Milada Horáková, he was working in Odeon. All of the employees were gathered at the courtyard and had to hold one hand up high in support of Milada Horáková’s execution. They were under a lot of stress. All of them were under surveillance and therefore lifted their hands. My father was there with a colleague and when they got to the yard they spat in each other’s faces to somehow come to terms with being counted among the people who raised their hand for Milada Horáková’s death.”