Ing. Libor Hörbe

"I was fully aware of the regime I was living in. It was clear, there were limits. I was lucky enough to get to West Germany where we had relatives when I was 16, so I saw what it was like there. Of course I knew that this decision was a one-way street. You run away, yes, it's possible, but there's no going back. Of course, you could run without a foreign currency certificate if you saved up enough for a trip with Čedok. I also always thought of [emigration] as a possibility, or at least from the age when I realised what emigration was. But I never really considered it because, all that time I partially considered the situation here in Czechoslovakia at that time as a farce. In high school, in grammar school, you understood it more, so we had more fun than in elementary school. We joked about it more to show off to the girls. In college, it was almost completely ridiculous because we were almost finished people and the end of the regime was coming, and some things were just plain ridiculous. I perceived it all the time that I was living with a... what was happening around me seemed more like a farce. Then there was a major turning point when I took the job. I'm not sure if it was before or after my military service. We were sent to a compulsory meeting, I don't remember what it was for. That meeting was chaired and spoken at by the chairman of the party cell at LIAZ. It was a speech that was basically about nothing. At the end, there was a vote on something, but that was basically about nothing too. I'd already been used, over the years, to not oppose the regime externally, but in some of my community and at home I would say what I wanted to. So when I voted, I just raised my hand for something I basically didn't even care about. It was some complete bullshit... All of a sudden, I look around and see all these people standing, every single one of them, with their hands up. That's where I remember, that was the first moment it dawned on me, and I said, well, this isn't gonna work. I'm gonna have to run away. I can't stay in this, just to sit here and act the way I'm acting. I don't think it's gonna be easy for me to start protesting anything right now. That was kind of a weird first moment where I thought, 'I'm going to have to run away.'"

"Not that I felt any pressure being forced into anything, nor was I offered membership in the party. But the frustrating thing was that I as a newcomer - and of course I saw it in other newcomers too, especially those fresh from school [CTU] - had some fresh ideas despite socialism. I didn't want to do the job just because I had to go to work. It became clear very soon that our ideas would not get past managers who didn't want to get into any trouble. I think the case was very often that the managers didn't really understand what they were supposed to do, so they were a priori afraid to try something like that, fearing they would embarrass themselves. The pace of work was... [very slow] compared to today,"

"I was taking the bus home with a fellow student, and he was going in the same direction as me. We were talking - I don't remember how we came to this - about possibly joining the party [Communist Party of Czechoslovakia] and he asked me what I thought of it. To tell you the truth, in spite of the way things were set up in my home, I never asked that question myself. I never really thought of what would happen if I was forced to do it and had children and things like that. Of course, back then everybody knew the way things were. He asked me about it, and I - because I had never thought about it - said neutrally, 'I don't really know, man,' and he said, 'How come you don't know?' I said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'Well, that's a fundamental thing. Once you join in, you're in on it.' And I realised at that moment that this person was more morally mature for that situation than I was, because he named it for me."