Suzette Hejdová

"Brave? I don't know. We didn't live in the '50s. In the fifties, Zbyněk would have been locked up like many people for maybe ten years, I don't know if I would have continued living here then. Or they would have thrown us out and not allowed us to come back. I don't know. That's what I felt, that life here is not as hard as it was then, in the fifties. But still, they managed to make life here so bad that to this day, I have wounds from it that haven't completely healed."

"I considered myself a completely unimportant person, and I don't understand why State Security followed me at all. They probably thought I had a much more important position here. They didn't realize I was only concerned with living here adequately and decently. But, indeed, I was fully connected with what my husband was doing - I supported him, and I never reproached him that we were in such a situation because of the signing of the Charter. It was probably enough for them that I praised the actions of the dissidents."

"I was a little bit terrified because I didn't know how it would be with him and them after the signing of Charter 77, how they would continue with their arrests. I lived in fear, but I suspected that it would be like that in a country like it was then. Someone wondered why Zbyněk didn't ask me whether he should sign or not. But in this, I thought it right that he should have a perfectly free hand and decide these things on his own. But I remember those first days. When they came for him to the antiquarian bookshop..."

"It was not a difficult decision. I wanted to be with Zbyněk anyway. I have to say that for me, he was a person who so dazzled me, mentally, that that was the most important thing. This may sound stupid, but it is true."

"Of course, 21 August in Prague. I can still describe that day to date. I remember it very precisely. I turned on the radio, I was in Paris, I was preparing for some exams that I had neglected because of the events of May, and at the same time I was listening to what was happening in Prague on the radio. It was a shock, a big shock, I told myself that I was definitely done with the communists."