Vlastimil Ježek

“My first wife was eight month with child back then in November, and of course she refused to stay at home, so it was a double emotional experience, starting with Albertov and that feeling of freedom, which suddenly spread from the nearest vicinity to an almost boundless space. It seems like a strange cliché now, but at the time, when you saw all those queer people around who controlled the state, and suddenly in that gathering you saw people around you - the estimates vary from five to fifty thousant, although there were no doubt a lot of stetsecs [State Security agents - trans.] there - the way those people looked, their faces, how they smiled, what they said, the signboards they held over their heads, it was a completely different world. It was an amazing feeling, including the march to Vyšehrad. The second type of experience was all the slogans the people in the procession were able to come up with, how human a language they used. I guess the most interesting experience for me was one moment down by the river, when an old lady leaned out of a window, merrily waving small state flags, and the procession chanted: ‘Long live grandma!’ After witnessing the May Day parades in Letná, with all those slogans and annoyed faces of people, ninety per cent of whom didn’t want to be there or were afraid not to be there, it was a great relief. The third experience was joy from the fact that me and my wife, who was tired, didn’t carry on to National Avenue - I doubt we would have had that child - but we went home instead. The fourth experience was that many of our classmates and friends, who had suffered under the batons in National Avenue, ended up in our place, in the open flat on the corner of Dlouhá Street and Old Town Square. It was a shock, how it all messed up so strangely. It was a kind of accelerated reaction - like the hopes of Škroupa Square and then months later Palach Week - but this time it was immediate - an afternoon of freedom followed by a rough evening.”

“Monday evening brought a bit of a catch, when most of us [left the building of the faculty and - trans.] went to Wenceslas Square. That was the famous trick of Dean Vaněk. A few people stayed there, and we later found them miserable and locked out of the faculty. The dean had told them that an occupation strike is dangerous and that they were economically responsible for the whole faculty, if anything would be lost, they would pay for it. He smoothtalked them, and so we spent the first night from 20 to 21 November on strike in about thirty to thirty-five people outside the faculty. It was very unpleasant, with a view of the armoured transports across the bridge. Luckily, the cleaning lady came at five a.m., we famously overcame her, she gave us the keys, and we didn’t let anyone push us out again after that. So that was the last trick of that Vaněk man. Before that - on Monday, when the meeting in the great hall came to an end - we had gone to visit Vaněk in the dean’s office to get the keys to the building. Docent Hroch was there, a listed State Security collaborator, and they were both in a proper fit: ‘And will there be a defenestration as well, eh?’ [several famous historical defenestrations took place in Prague - trans.] I replied: ‘Don’t joke about that, sir, don’t joke, we’re on the second floor.’”

“It was around my third year at grammar school. I had already started listening to foreign radio, and I heard from the broadcast that they’d arrested Dana Němcová. I remembered her as a kind, intelligent lady, who used to visit us at the summer camps and tell us interesting things and who hardly looked like an enemy of the state. I just couldn’t get it, and it even led me to make one desparate act, which was foiled by my class teacher, luckily. I wrote a funny letter, that I’m quitting the Union of Socialist Youth because I don’t understand how they could lock up such a lady. I delivered it proudly to the class chairman [of the USY - trans.], and he luckily handed my attempt at a protest to our class teacher, the chemist Krupka. Krupka then spent the next week explaining to me how awful it is to have to teach at grammar school as a scientist, just because he disagreed with the arrival of Soviet forces. That was awfully interesting. He didn’t tell me what to do, but his story led me to take the letter back at the end of the week. I’m actually glad it worked out like that, because if my classmate had sent it upwards, I think I wouldn’t have coped at my age of seventeen.”