Milan Horáček

"We immediately booked a plane and flew from Bonn to Berlin. We stayed up all night, we didn't sleep at all, and we were on that Kurfürstendamm where there were tens of thousands of Berliners. You couldn't always tell if they were from the West or the East. Those who were there late into the night were not dressed very well, and they were celebrating. Talking to each other and so on. And then we went right away semi-legally to East Berlin, where I had been once before, but I was arrested on the street and sent to West Berlin."

"For example, the boy who went with Ulrike Ackermann, who is still alive because she was younger then. She's not my age, she's a bit younger. They did it out of the conviction that it was necessary. Sensible people knew they were going... We had to teach them how to unscrew it, pull it out and hide it again. Normally at those borders [border guards] were not able to dismantle the whole VW bus camping gear." - "Who was taking over? Did they have a liason?" - "It was more people, of course. She [Ulrike Ackermann] had been here the year before with another partner. They weren't caught then. They [State Security] had probably already gotten around to it, but maybe they wanted to find out more. The ride that was seized afterwards, when they were arrested here in 1978, they were doing a little unloading in Pilsen. Which they didn't find out in the interrogations. They only talked about the final one, when they met a man in Wenceslas Square who had an apple in his hand as a sign. They knew how to address him, that was the agreed password. And then the point was that they handed him a handwritten note where it was deposited. They were on their way to the border, out of Prague, and then they were arrested when he went to get the stuff. But it wouldn't have played a role, because we found out that the guy was set up." - "He was an agent." - "He wasn't. He was being blackmailed. As far as I know so far, he was a concentration camp agent, but he did all sorts of shenanigans afterwards, some kind of black marketeering."

"Our first car that we redesigned [for literature smuggling], where we had changed chassis parts and so... We had secret, customized entrances in it where we could hide one or two big suitcases of materials that we were bringing in. In 1978, a pair [of couriers] sent out by me were arrested and only released after a month. Many people intervened on their behalf, from Heinrich Böll to Willy Brandt. We had it insured to a certain extent. Now I'm working on it with people from the Institution for Study of Toalitarian Regimes. We've rebuilt several of these cars. Then we delivered to various addresses in Czechoslovakia Letters (Listy), Testimonies (Svědectví), things from Škvorecký, from the Index publishing house. But one fine day we found out that the car that was caught was taken over by a former concentration camp prisoner who knew a little German, but was broken, turned over by the State Security. Later on, we increasingly developed that cooperation in a different way. Me, in particular, I was in contact with people with diplomatic passports, for example, members of parliament who used to go to Czechoslovakia and met with those people, starting with Václav Havel and others. And the things that they were carrying had some weight. And then there were other ways of conveying those things. At the same time, we also went twice a summer, at the beginning and at the end, to Yugoslavia, where we distributed a lot of these materials to vacationers."

"We had this legend that we were only going there for one night. We had a toothbrush, normal clothes and money. That we were going to buy wine for a wedding. Which was true in a way. He [my friend František] was from such a big family, five children, they had relatives there. So that we were going there to go shopping at some friends of his. And first we'd go to the cemetery. As if one of his friends had died. And then we'd stay there till night. He explained to me that some of the people there were reporting to police. They were the ones who knew who might be a cop. So then we went to the border at night. In that last part, we were prepared - we had double trousers and sweatpants over that - so that we could crawl. We tried to crawl against that horizon. Then at one of the gates, he helped me where to stand and how to swing over. And then we ran. We weren't climbing over three wires, just two. Because we were almost at the company that was already in the border zone behind the border line. The one thing he didn't explain to me properly or prepare me for was that... - he was running, he was running, and I couldn't keep up. He said that after we crossed the wires, we had to run a few kilometers into the Austrian interior because we didn't know if we had shorted out the low current and set off some kind of alarm. And that if they sent dog handlers with dogs after us, they would pull us several kilometres out of Austrian territory. They said it had already happened. Of course, they would get gold watches, passes and so on for that when they caught some poor Polish or 'Dederon' (DDR inhabitant). Because somehow the Czechs didn't run away so much in 1966/1967, when he was serving there."

“One time I was assigned to work with a certain truck driver, and my work also included loading the cargo. He told me: ‘Now, we’ll place these four or five bags on the edge, but we will not fold them one over another.’ Then he drove through one bend in the road more aggressively than usual, and these bags slid from the truck down to the ditch. In the rear mirror I could see that some villager ran there from his house with a wheelbarrow, and he started loading the bags onto it right away. We received some hen or duck in return for it, or some home made jams with some pork meat or something like that. The driver himself was usually taking money for it. Everything like that was a part of it – you saw and perceived that there was a double way of living. There is the life which you present in the public, and which the socialist republic declares, and then there is the reality. Those everyday small and big lies, deceit and hypocrisy were even more augmented by straight corruption.”

“The political development was too conservative for us. We were thus looking for a way – perhaps to establish some new, different party, which would be perhaps on the left from the social democracy or in a different relationship with the already established parties. A party which would have nothing to do with DKP – who were the East Germany-Moscow-oriented communists at that time – nor with the Left, which was ideologically restricted in a way: in a Marxist way, in a Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, or Trockist way. That was all sectarian in a way. What we were after was to deal with problems of late capitalism which had certain dimensions of a social market economy. But it was only partly social while it was strongly market-oriented. Deep problems began to ensue. Problems with the way people were treated –the workforce, gastarbeiters, and so on, and then how everything else was treated: the environment, the sources of our being.”

“I experienced the D-Day, November 17th, in some meeting of the Green Party, where I was actually glued to the phone all the time – I remember this precisely – with Zdeněk Mlynář in Vienna, and with Jiří Pelikán in Rome, and with some people who were available here in Prague. But I didn’t speak with Václav Havel or Dienstbier, because they were gone all the time, traveling somewhere. There were no mobile phones at that time. When I called Havel’s apartment some other time – when they had their phone connected and maybe even monitored – Ivan Havel would usually pick up the phone. They already lived on the Vltava embankment at that time. I would always ask him if Vašek was at home, and he would reply that he would go and check. That was such a custom. Havel allegedly always fussed that I was keeping him from his work, but he would come to the phone anyway. I asked him the usual things, how he was doing and what was going on. He would then talk to me about something for an hour. I would then phone the content of what he had told me to various people all over the world. I now meet with Ivan from time to time and we remember various things. And this is one thing that we like to remember, became in spite of all this, they were somehow separated from that world.”