“It was 28 October, we were at St Wenceslaus’ [the statue in Wenceslaus Square in the centre of Prague - trans.], and suddenly a load of cops with long truncheons marched up, Dad fell to the ground, I lifted him up, dragged along the ground, and suddenly I got a wallop on my back. It was a decent cop. If he’d wanted to he could have broken my back with that truncheon. I had a proper bruise there, and I was proud of it. I dragged Dad along the ground so they wouldn’t trample me. He started telling them something there, but they were there for business all right.”
“People no doubt brought books there that were removed from libraries at the time, that were on the index. [What happened to the books?] We either distributed them among ourselves, or there was a crate there, which Mrs Tejnorová chucked them into when she started getting a bit afraid. She chucked the books there and the people knew they could take them from the other side of the curtain. It was a kind of an unspoken agreement. That we didn’t sell them, as if. Škvorecký, for example. If it wasn’t something special, in which case we’d keep it for ourselves. But look here, that was an officially published list of books that were banned from being sold. Well, it was actually unofficial. Because officially, a list like that couldn’t even exist according to the Helsinki Accords. It was a cyclostyled list with the publication titles and what you weren’t allowed to sell. For instance, an afterword by Škvorecký, or anything by Masaryk - in short, the slightest aberration got a book on the forbidden list.”
“I did philosophy under Tomin, philosophy under Hejdánek in his flat in Vinohrady, and I attended Ivan Dejmal’s lectures. I devoured it all. They even brought in a Dutch man from abroad, and they interpreted what he told us. I didn’t actually have an education, and Tomin read us philosophy in the original language, Greek, and then he translated it for us there and tried to explain it - so I saw a philosopher in action. It was terribly boring for a lot of people because it went down terrible deep. But they needed to talk about it, and that hooked me. People could do it in their flats. I even got my credit from Machovec. [Q: How long did you attend these seminars for?] A long time. They started hunting us more and more. I went with Ivan Dejmal to be questioned by State Security one time. But we were already instructed by old Lederer that we mustn’t say anything.”
“I can still remember when I was at Tomin’s place and saw his bruised up wife. She was blue, black, like the worst sodden hobo after being mashed up by skinheads. That was something incredible. Tomin resolutely refused to leave the country. He always declared that we had to stay here. That we wouldn’t do them the kindness. Until they beat up his wife, then he packed up and left. Then Třešňák left, who’d also refused to go. The operations were pretty rough. [Q: Zdena Tominová, that’s a well-known case, she was beaten up by State Security.] I saw her with my own eyes, really. I was shocked. [Q: Did you have any previous experience with the stetsecs (secret police - trans.)?] I was just at that one interrogation, which I spoke about, and that was my only experience. Then left me alone after that. They didn’t get anything out of me because all my replies to their questions were: I don’t know.”
“Those are the paradoxes of the Communist regime. If you were a favoured group, you studied at university, you joined the intelligentsia, but then you didn’t the kind of protection that you had enjoyed as a worker. They accepted me to grammar school because Mum was working class. But then the next generation was disadvantaged. The Communists were actually digging out the ground beneath their own feet.”
“Not me. I was pretty well worked by the people who said it was important to stay. But if they’d beaten me up, I guess I would have considered it. The truth is that it wasn’t my problem. Mostly the people I knew held that it was better to stay. Hutka actually had his last concert in my flat. I lived in Havelská Street. He played at my place just before he emigrated. The way we saw it, the people were practically forced to leave the country. [Q: Hutka had his last concert before emigration in your flat?] Yes. At Havelská 5. It was in my place because a lot of the flats were already staked out by the cops. So I put my flat at his disposal. It was in the centre, and it was possible to gather there for a while, before someone found it or ratted it out, I guess. So Machovec lectured in my flat, Jiří Němec did, and others. Those were times...”
Jan Augustin Hofman was born on 9 November 1955 in Prague. His father was an electrical engineer, his mother was working class, which allowed the witness to study at grammar school, which he graduated from in 1975. At university he met Aleš Lederer, who had been expelled from his studies for political reasons - this influenced Jan Augustin‘s political stance. He abandoned his studies prematurely in 1977. He was employed at the second-hand bookshop in Dlážděná Street, which was frequented by people from the arts and the dissent. He also trained as a bookseller and was active in the experimental music group Žabí hlen (Frog Mucus). In 1980 he left the bookshop to have more free time fore himself. He was protected from legal punishment as a freeloader by the stamp of a fictional employer on his ID card. He earned a decent living as a vendor of Večerní Praha (Evening Prague, a newspaper) for two years, and then started a family and found a job as a boiler man. In the 1970s and 80s he attended illegal house seminars, such as the one‘s at Julius Tomin‘s flat, where he met his future wife, who was brutally interrogated by State Security. In the second half of the 1980s he participated in various demonstrations and witnessed violent police assaults. In the 1980s he decided to stop drinking alcohol, which had ruined his life, and he found salvation in Christianity. Before November 1989 he switched jobs and began working as a youth carer; he continued in the profession after the revolution at the community centre in Barrandov - until 1995, when he returned to book selling. He kept a second-hand book stall at Masaryk Station (later at Smíchov Station) for fifteen years. He is also the owner of the second-hand bookshop in Kotevní Street.
