Ing. Aleš Kopecký

"That was persecution and why I left Prague. Because firstly, I wasn't allowed to go to college, as State Security said, and moreover, I knew we were always being watched. I sometimes tripped over them, they sometimes hid behind the bushes badly, the secret policemen. And last but not least, that the phone was bugged, so I knew that it was just... It wasn't active, it was passive. But I knew that I was living in an environment where someone was always watching if I went over there or elsewhere and what I was doing. Well, since I somehow did not like that, I just left for České Budějovice. I've never been there in my life, beware. Only once or twice on trips. But I left for České Budějovice. And I did well, I did well again, and that was another lucky choice in my life."

"It's the other way around. I have a number of friends in Slovakia, I always had and I still have them to this day. Now I just recently congratulated one of them. And my dad had them too. Here in the correspondence there is, for example, Petr Karloš, here is Katarina Lazarská, a Slovak writer, and so on. And I think that coexistence was far more meaningful and productive than after the separation. I understand their desire, but maybe only half a million, otherwise they have Hungarians and all those minorities there. Slovakia was not like us, which pushed out the Germans, who amounted up to 2.6 million, when they were evaded just after the war. Slovakia was slightly different; there are over three million Slovaks. And perhaps in the area of culture, they feel it negatively to this day. I'm a person in favor of radio, I'm not a television person, but even on that radio, if you have memories, even now on the anniversary of Mr. Smoljak´s eightees, everyone was talking about it, because the blending of those nations historically, simply the blending of their culture, in the end was also an economical bond.”

"Dad held the post of deputy there, but basically Galuška came from diplomatic sources. So he was a kind of diplomatic staff of that ministry, which he did in an excellent way. Then there was the second deputy in chargé of church affairs. Dad was the one who pulled the culture. Also, for example, the Ministry's program - he sat locked up here for two months and wrote it here. The program of the Ministry at the time. Well, when normalization came and politicians such as Bilak, Indra, Husák took power, normalization started, so he was right on the front line, among the first to take it away. And he was persecuted so that he was thrown out everywhere; that was from Charles University, they even abolished the theater history department at that time. Basically, the normalizers suddenly said that the people who had been doing it for twenty years, that they were doing it all wrong. And for that they were persecuted. So he was basically out of job for a year or two. He got it from Husák because he knew Husák. Husák was a persona of the 1950s who was persecuted. They knew each other. He also met him and got a confirmation in his identity card that he was a freelance writer, at that time it had to be confirmed in his identity card. But he was not allowed to publish, he was not allowed to perform. So he cleaned the snow on Štvanice stadium and swept the sidewalks."

„The persecution. At that time in the year 1971 and later, Mr. Pithart devoted himself a lot to it, so there were 534 thousand people of our intelligentsia, of this country, which the ruling elite somehow sent away. My father then got a job at Water Resources Zličín. Zličín Water Resources was an organization that dealt with hydrological research of water in the countryside. This was done quite carefully back then, nowadays no one even thinks about it, about such meticulous people... and they had their caravans, which traveled around in different ways. Indeed, the landscape was monitored, measured, the hydrogeologists simply collected data. And they observed that these people are very careful and that they just don't cheat, in the sense that they go around once a week and just write the data there, but that they are really precise and that they follow through. So this organization started collecting those people. For example, Petr Pithart, the later president of the Senate, right, Křen, who basically made the Constitution after the revolution, worked in it. So he did, he wrote it there, didn't he. In other words, there were a number of people who lived off those caravans, they simply had their work in a drawer, because I know that, for example, Křen with Pithart and my father also took part in it, those were the caravans around Zákup, so they started writing the new Constitution there in 1986, because they believed it would simply be needed.“

"So in April, he took my mom and Ivana here to Bílé Podolí, where we had an aunt, because he had an inkling that something was going to happen, and he returned back to Prague. And there was definitely something going on, that were the event of the Prague Uprising. And father was a member of the Prague Uprising; maybe I forgot to say one thing there, he was also a member of the Opletal Committee, which the Germans selected. And it is said in my family that at that time, when the Germans weeded it out, he ran away from Prague here, and that in the corner, where the birch tree grows now, he then planted a small birch tree there at that time, so he survived it. And so he went back to the struggles of the Prague Uprising and joined the Communist Party on 5/5/1945, where he was accepted by Mr. Smrkovský. On the barricades in Strossmayer Square.“