Jan Hrad

“I once read the Dalton Trumba anti-war book called Johnny took his rifle. And I read a snippet of it and someone reported it, because it was a terrible anti-war snippet. So they reported me with the book. With the same book I had to go to Olomouc to the prosecutor to explain that the book was not forbidden. That it was normally published in the '78 edition, I had to take it with me. That prosecutor read it then and could do nothing as it was not prohibited. But they thought it was a forbidden book. And it was allowed. So he could not do anything, but he said, when he read it, he would forbid it. It was weird he had to see it. And he hid it for himself.”

“I was chosen as a cadre reserve under the condition that when I was taken to school, in the evening industrial studies - and I did not know - that I would be the so called cadre reserve and that they would come after me and ask me to join communist party. So the cadre man came to me and said, "Will you join?" And I refused to do so. And I was kidding and justified it so that my great-grandfather is still alive and that he is a monarchist and that he would not have survived it at all. He could not stand Masaryk, he could not stand him at all. And that he's over ninety years old and that it would been his death. And they knew it was fun, so they did not accept me.”

“After Sunday lunch we used to bring the mugs to the beer pub. The Russian tank then drove down the Doudlevecká street and there were cobblestones everywhere. The Slovanská and Doudlevecká street in Pilsen, they were all made of cobblestones. And the Russian tank was spinning there at full speed, we stood in the pub and the pub owner was tapping beer in our pitchers. At that moment, the tanker blew a pavement cube out of the belt, going through the window to the pub and broke the glass. And then the pub owner shouted, "Jesus, they are shooting at us from the tanks!" And they all laid down the ground. And I did not have the beer served, but the neighbour, as as he was laying, he poured half the pitcher out. And then we carried it home, and I heard at the door, "You have been drinking the beer again from the pitcher!" And the neighbour said, "No, dad, we were shot at by a Russian tank!" - "I'll give you a shooting tank!" He did gave him a slapping over his face, and since then my neighbour hated the Russians.”

“At night the planes woke us up. And in the morning we got up. The radio was still running normally. And my parents panicked that there was war. As I was only little back then, they took me to my aunt in the countryside to Chrást. That's where I was safe. But it was paradoxical so that they had all the tanks in the Chrást at the railway station and that there were even more Russians than in Pilsen. As there was a rail cordon to Prague, there were plenty of tanks. We were walking among them as small boys, because we enjoyed it, as we were just small.”

“Sometime in '77, '78 we learned that here, on the beach of Ostende in Bolevec, the Plastic People band will be playing a secret concert. So we went out there. I was about sixteen, seventeen years old. With our friends, we went there to see the Plastic People. They were forbidden to play. It was known for the professor Patočka was advocating it afterward - though he could not even hear it, not even a piece of her song . There was a lot of trouble due to its existence back then; a big trouble. So we set out for that concert, sitting there - it was out in a nice silence - now they were meeting - they were the kind of hairy boys, and they were called; all the guys with rather long hair. The band was not a too good musically, but we were out there for protesting that it was forbidden; to protest against the regime. And before we sat down [and] sang the slogan, we were surrounded by cops and state policemen. And suddenly the circle closed. We managed to escape. Through Bolevecký rybník we swam in reeds. There we were hiding in the mud. And one of my friends, Lada Klas, was caught and arrested. And he was terribly lucky, because the cop was asking him: "Do you go to school or a professional training? What gymnasium do you attend, or you attend a high school? ' And he said he was trained to become a bricklayer. And those cops now did not know what to do with him, because if he had been attending a high school, they would have to gotten him out of gymnasium, because he attended a forbidden concert, so they could go to a school to complain and he could have been kicked out of school, but he said he was being trained as a bricklayer. And they did not know now-Jesus, how could we kick him out, it's stupid, now we do not have enough of them. So they beat him with a baton real hard. They beat him up and let him go.”

“The year eighty-ninth it was terrible... It was something unimaginable for the people. We have experienced here that we could not go anywhere. And suddenly, in the 1990s, it was an amazing thing to get into the car and all of a sudden I went through Europe. Without anything... Well you had to show a passport. There were borders, there was no Schengen agreement yet, it could not be normal. But it was something unimaginable. First I went to Vienna to my friend, who ran away there. And I crossed the border to Austria. And then I stopped there and did not want to believe that I was on the other side. Now I was looking at the better roads. And all the shops ... One did not want to believe it. I thought I'd wake up from the dream.”

“My mom did not like to go to Greece, I know. Either there was a conflict with the locals, because they always looked her, when she showed her passport, looking at them like the outsiders, like those who had been harming the country. Today's officials, who have not experienced it, they considered those people in such a way ... She did not go there too often, because when she came there or we drove through the villages of northern Greece, she saw the war there. Just what she remembered from her childhood, the burned houses, murders and escapes all the time and much hunger. Constant hiding in the forest during the night, when there was bombing or when the troops were crossing. That was happening during the whole war. The whole war, and then two more years after it finished. So she actually witnessed five, six, seven years in war.”