Vladimír Hanzel

“The Unionists called the festival ‘Songs for Peace’. When I criticised that to my future wife, she told me: ‘If you think the title’s dumb, the festival will be called differently.’ And I retorted: ‘It’s not all that dumb. On the contrary! We just have to take it literally. Halfway through the festival there’ll be a peace song.’ The following year I played Lennon’s Give Peace A Chance from tape, people joined in and sang with him, that was good. A year later I played Sun City, a song against the apartheid in South Africa. That was connected to an article I wrote for Gramorevue, in which I whimsically compared the apartheid to the situation in Czechoslovakia - in 1948 a handful of people in South Africa usurped the right to rule, which was quite a parallel to what had happened here. People were used to reading between the lines back then, and I know a lot of readers were intrigued by the text.”

“When the political trials were taking place and the radio presenter was saying of someone that they had betrayed the nation, disappointed us, and so on, Mum would protest: ‘But we know him, and he’s a decent person!’ And Dad just went: ‘Psst! Don’t speak about it in front of the children.’ And they switched to German or Yiddish, so we wouldn’t understand them.”