Jan Hammer

"Up in the square basically from my co-worker Karel 'Charlie' when I was paying out the bus drivers that I was giving money to from the money I made. I was giving them a hundred crowns or [some] money to drive. So Charlie would say to me, 'Honza, jeez, Havel appeared there!' I said, 'So what.' It didn't even hit me, but I really didn't know that he was going to perform there or would perform there. It wasn't until I got to the amphitheater that I saw a bunch of people backstage and he was signing something. I was like, this is probably not going to be good."

"This thing with Václav Havel [his public appearance]. It was a moment I didn't even see. I wasn't even there. At that moment, I was walking towards the bus drivers, negotiating with them and bringing them money from the fund so they would drive until the end and not give up. As I was returning, Charlie ran out–we used to call him that–he was working with me at the Youth Club, and suddenly he says, 'Dude, Václav Havel made a speech!' I said, 'So he did. What about it?' Then, when I came there, there was a crowd of people around him. He was signing some bills. So I thought to myself, this is probably not going to be good."

"It was my parents who asked Dr Kašpar, a psychiatrist, to help me because I was already on the verge of a breakdown. Of course, he came but was accompanied by the police because they were afraid something would happen to them. He injected me with some sedatives, and then they put me in an ambulance, and I went to a psychiatric hospital. There they put me into a cage to be nice and well-behaved. The doctors there treated me well because they knew what it was all about. They gave me electric shocks like in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest [film]. It will erase your memory so that you forget the bad. The memories will come back to you in time, but you will forget some of the details completely."

"You won't even find it out. I know what caused it, the system. The system that was in place was the main culprit. That some little man - I don't want to belittle the person of Václav Havel - will come out there [at Folková Lipnice in 1988] in a green jacket and say a few words. Everyone gets a kick out of it, they [the communist apparatus] get a kick out of it, and then they wipe you out like a towel. What kind of system is it if you can't speak your mind? If he had said something edgy, but he didn't say anything at all. He just said he was happy that there was such a conspiratorial atmosphere and that he was performing in front of such a crowd for the first time. And that the last time he spoke publicly was in Klement Gottwald's Nová huť (New iron and steel works). And that was all. He walked away, and then things like this happened."

"Rough years had come for me. On the one hand, it drove me crazy, and on the other hand, I kept smoking during the interrogations. I couldn't stand it. When you have this disease, you feel like someone is watching you, even more so when they have windows right opposite here. I was so upset that I flew to get the State Security man, whom I knew where he lived. At night I dragged him out of the house and told him, 'Come with me or explain to me why you keep following me?' 'We are not following you. There's a light there, but we're not following you.' Then it escalated and escalated until I collapsed. It's a long story, which is not so simple in terms of explanation. It was the impulse, but it certainly wasn't the cause."