“November 17th was Friday, it happened at night, and I had a night shift from Saturday to Sunday, and they always came to us, at two in the morning the trains arrived, and they brought fresh newspapers. And suddenly there was a report in two newspapers that was simply true, which did not happen under the Bolsheviks. There was simply a short message about the fact that there was a demonstration, that it was unauthorized and that brutally suppressed by the police. So I thought to myself: 'Um, something is happening.' Therefore, the second morning after my shift, I immediately went to Wenceslas square. Moreover, that was actually the first demonstration that was; no one had organized it yet. There were no speakers, just people, who were quite angry. And they were angry in the way that there was a police camera, the one that stared at the horse on Wenceslas Square, someone climbed up to the newsstand and grabbed that camera by the cable and threw it away. The cops stood around, watched, and did nothing. So I was like, 'Good, good! It's off to a good start.' But we were still worried the whole time, yeah, if we didn't get it right, at least. Then someone came up with the idea that we should go to Prague Castle, so it went. There were already thousands of those people. We barricaded the trams, simply trams scribbled with candles, and as a matter of fact you could feel that suddenly something was happening, just in two or three days. We came to the bridge, which is near the Faculty of Law, that we went to the Castle to see Jakeš, who was coincidentally not there. Well, we got halfway to the bridge and there was a double cordon of cops, armoured personnel carriers with nets, and they just stopped it there. So we kept standing, it was cold in November. Then we sat on the ground. We did not know what was going to happen, we could not go back; there were people everywhere. I was looking at the river, it was already dark, and I said: 'If I have to jump, should I swim the fifty meters to the other side, or not?' We really thought they would start beating us. But they had orders to do nothing, so they just waited until the people cared no longer, and all gradually left.”
