Jan Král

“I remember that in 1977 they talked to us about the Charter in school. Even before, we had already been forbidden to wear clothes with some written signs, especially English ones, to school. A lecture on Charter 77 was a part of our education. The comrade teacher said: ‘Children, when you walk home from school, you go through the Lenin Street, and there is a bookshop and the shop called Dílo there. An now imagine that there are people in our country who claim that they are not allowed to write books and paint some paintings. But you can see it for yourselves when you walk past that bookshop and you see that there are many books there. And there are paintings hanging in the Dílo shop. So what these people claim is not true at all.’ I still remember it, even today. At that time it was already obvious to me that they were lying to us. The lie was obvious. I would be able to reconstruct that lecture precisely. If I wrote a screenplay for some film from that period, I would include that scene in there without hesitation.”

“The contacts with the State Security had several stages. At first they were persuading you to cooperate. They were telling you what an intelligent person you were, and that one day you would marry and you would need a better job and a better apartment and more money. And that they were able to arrange all this for you. This was the first stage. The next stage consisted in them telling you about some other and better known dissidents and telling you how many dollars they were receiving from the West. ‘And did you get any dollars? You didn’t, right? Well, there you see.’ And at other times they were saying that these people from the underground were just drug addicts and drunkards. Why would they be dirtying their hands with such trash? But this kind of tactics did not have any effect on any of these groups. We would always meet afterwards and laugh about it.”

“I thought that the regime would never change. I could not imagine it. I was really contemplating emigration frequently and for a long time. The State Security encouraged me to emigrate and my whole life would have been really changed by it. Emigration was thus present in my thoughts every day. That’s for sure. Thinking whether I should not just leave it all there and go away and start enjoying a normal life. But I could not imagine that the regime here would collapse. There were optimists, like Tomáš Hradílek, for instance, who was saying that it would collapse soon. They were the generation of 1968, but our generation has never experienced anything else but the normalization period. The change of Svoboda for Husák was the biggest political change in twenty years.”