Jiří Fiedor

“It was pretty clear to me and I didn’t hesitate for a moment. I wanted to sign it individually some time earlier and I told the boys, the friends that I visited the Šavrdas with, that I was already decided, that I’d sign it. They said wait a bit, we’ll all sign it, we want to sign it too, the boys from Opava, someone from Ostrava, and Lubomír Salzmann from Havířov. So my impression is that we signed it together in December 1988 or something like that. It was in connection to the fact that Tomáš Hradílek was to be spokesman and that we’d give it to him then, when we signed it. So that’s how it actually happened that we signed it towards the end of 1988 and handed it over to Tomáš. I know I already wanted to sign it in September, some time earlier. Back then you didn’t think about whether to sign it sooner or later. The idea of the regime failing, to quickly sign it while I could, it didn’t work like that of course. And also I was twenty-three years old at the time. So when you’re young, strong, radical, you don’t think about what ifs.”

“So then we decided – I don’t remember if it might have been the start of 1989, we actually started publishing in samizdat, a monthly, it was called the North Moravian Passivity. It was a joint project of the people who gathered at the Šavrdas for those political discussions. Those were people from Bohumín, Ostrava, Opava, Krnov, Karviná, Český Těšín, Havířov, it started snowballing like that. So we reckoned we actually wanted to do something of our own, to comment on political affairs in our own way. So in early 1989 we started making that North Moravian Passivity. I don’t know if we had twelve, fourteen issues, something like that. We made it in pretty big print runs. At first it was copied out on to carbon paper, one or two issues were printed out at Jirka Hanus’s flat, in a block of flats in Ostrava-Dubina. But then we printed it in this one garden cottage of his wife’s parents. He always borrowed the hut for the weekend, and five or six of us came there at most. We made it there in print runs of, I don’t know, but it was in the hundreds for sure. Because everyone had a load of addresses that he sent it out to. So we divided it up and it went out into practically the whole country.”