The way the censors usually did it stemmed from self-censorship. Deleting a full article completely was something that didn't happen. It started happening only with, for example, the Strahov events in the autumn of 1967, at the turn of October and November 1967. They just deleted entire articles, and then we were savagely criticized by the student public for that: for not being able to take a stand on it, for not being able to write about it at all - not only for not being able to write truthfully about it, but for not writing about it at all. No one can imagine the kind of pressure we were subjected to.
Then I actually joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and that was a different matter. Again, practically all of us did. In that class, which started school in 1960, there were originally only about eleven or twelve of us, and then some foreign students came in. Both boys and girls were joining the Communist Party, and we were joining it knowing full well that we didn't like a lot of stuff going on at the time. And although a lot of people say that we were just justifying it four ourselves and in fact we were budding careerists at that young or teenage age, at least myself and a few others went in because if we wanted to make a difference in society. See, not being members of the party or candidates for membership, we didn't have the slightest chance of achieving anything like that or influencing anything, just no chance at all.
"My dad took me everywhere with him. I don't know; maybe to relieve my mother, because I had a younger sister, so he took me to these events with him. So we were in Mirotice, painter Mikoláš Aleš's birthplace in South Bohemia, and I recall there was this huge long table where all the people from Mirotice, as well as the employees of the ministry and other cultural workers, were sitting. And it seemed to me that the table was infinitely. The oldest attendee of that session was sitting at one end of the table, that was Zdeněk Nejedlý, and I was sitting at the other end, opposite him. Nejedlý kept asking me: 'So, how do you like it, Petr?' He kept asking me, and I remember Nejedlý as this nice little old fellow."
Petr Feldstein was born in Prague on 8 December 1943 to mother Božena, née Bláhová, and father Walter Feldstein. His father was of Jewish descent, and in 1943 he was interned in the camp in Lípa near Havlíčkův Brod, then imprisoned in Terezín. His father was the secretary of the union of cultural workers, his mother was a housewife, and both joined the Communist Party. Through his father, Petr Feldstein got to meet cultural celebrities. At the age of sixteen, he was admitted to the Faculty of Philosophy at Charles University to study journalism, graduating in 1966. During his studies, he joined the Party and refused an offer to cooperate with the State Security Service. He became deputy editor-in-chief of the Student weekly, which was published from 1965. After the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968, the editorial board decided to close the magazine. Petr Feldstein had problems finding a job, then worked at the S. K. Neumann Theatre and as a well-digger, and with the State Racecourse from 1977. He worked at Czechoslovak Television as news editor from March 1990, later becoming editor and dramaturge in the sports department. He published 15 books. Petr Feldstein lived in Prague in 2022.
