Iva Kotrlá

"My husband has been to Hrádeček [Václav Havel's cottage] two or three times. There was also a meeting there. He said they had to sneak through the woods to get there, but he got there. I wasn't there. Sometimes I had to stay at home with the children. My husband was also once invited to Zvěřina's [Roman Catholic priest and Charter 77 signatory Josef Zvěřina] birthday party. The party was held at the cottage of Marie Rút Křížková [spokesperson for Charter 77]. Her husband went there by car. Milan Uhde, Jan Trefulka and Zdeněk Rotrekl drove and went with him. The security had the whole cottage surrounded, all the access roads, nobody could get in. Security stopped them, of course. My husband thought it would be bad. Milan Uhde describes it nicely in his book of memories. Fortunately, the policemen didn't ask them for their IDs, they asked my husband where they were going. And the husband told them that he was a co-worker and that they were going there to guard the place, and they let them go. And when they arrived at the cottage, nobody understood that they had gotten there. And the husband said that he wasn't even lying because they were collaborators, but with another party... Milan Uhde still remembers it, that it was an amazing experience."

"Two sisters lived next door to the two peasants. They never joined [the JZD]. It was like when you see the movie All the Good Natives. Those sisters were poor. They drove a wagon, farmed the fields, they were hit, but they didn't give up. For me, it was such a phenomenon on our street. But people didn't appreciate it. They mocked them in the style of whether they needed it. That was the atmosphere there. It seemed to me that whoever was in the JZD was a higher elite, something more. He worked in the fields. He got paid for it, he still had a little garden behind the field, he grew some vegetables there for himself and he was perceived as a better person. And those who stayed to work in the fields and didn't join the JZD, they were perceived in society as people of weak minds, that they were not normal."