Věra Krincvajová

"I think... ...lest you misunderstand... ...but I think the only way is to lift yourself up a little bit internally, some may call it 'spiritually', 'religiously'. Just to see yourself as part of a larger whole, a larger history, something longer than the individual. So, to do the best I can for myself, so that when I leave (it here) and look at the other side of this life, it won't be hell - purgatory, if you will. To make it like I'm at peace with myself. And I believe that the universe and consciousness was here before planet Earth and will continue. So, from that standpoint, I believe that somehow…. everything makes sense. And everything is leading to some kind of learning. Everything is a school."

"At the “Concert for All Decent People” in Lucerna, where both semi-banned, banned and official bands met together - such a bizarre thing - someone introduced me to a man who looked like an elderly “hippie” in that hall full of people. They introduced him to me as Kocour (Tomcat). It was Mr. Kocour Havelka, who had basically been forced to leave the country with his whole family as part of the “Decontamination” Action and now he was able to return. And when he found out that it was me, one of the two that were with that Adamec, he was there hugging me and jumping with joy and saying, 'You can't imagine, you have no idea how great it is that we can be here.' I guess those people just needed to personify that feeling somehow, so he just thanked me for everybody at that concert. And he was like, 'Well, but at such a great time, why are you still so sad?' And I was like, 'Because we need to write now, this is the time when we need to just fix the information. And we've got a newsroom ready, and we don't have the money to do it.' He said, 'How much do you need?' I don't know, it was something like sixty thousand for that first number - an astronomical amount for us. So, I told him. And this Kocour, a re-emigrant - I wouldn't have thought that about him - between those hippies, people in tattered jeans, with long hair and beards - and he says, 'Yeah, so it doesn't mean anything to me. And if it's a bunch of students like you, and they're after the same things, I'll give it to you.' And I connected him to Pažout, I phoned him from somewhere. The next day, Kocour went in there with a briefcase and actually gave him the money. That's how we published Student Letters."

"Then in Mikulandska, somehow I was pushed against the wall. And still in front of me was a layer of people, some girls about the same height, the same age as me, crying and screaming in pain as the crowd crushed them, pushed them against that wall. This one girl had a completely unnaturally dislocated arm, I think there just had to be some physical problem just by the way she was being crushed against the wall. I was like, 'Well, either I'm going to get trampled by these people, I'm going to end up like this, or I'm going to get slaughtered by these cops who created this bloody alleyway.' And I just heard the swish, swish - the sound of the baton. These were some kind of telescopic batons that gained more speed with the swing, and it was really quite a terrible sound. And you can hear the bones of these people cracking underneath, screaming - it's something completely unnatural. I felt like one of those beasts in the circus who knows he's afraid of fire and doesn't want to jump into the fire, but he just jumps in because there's a worse evil. So I thought, I'm going to the fire. Rather than get crushed, I think I'm just gonna get beat up, I think it's more likely I'll survive with a concussion. So I tried to get into the current, which is going down that bloody alley. And then the most incredible thing happened. There were two guys, big guys, in down jackets, and one of them grabbed some strange girl on the left, and the other one grabbed me and said, 'I've saved some girls, I'll accompany you out, don't worry. So he wrapped me up like this with the jacket, I went underneath him. I don't know if maybe you went skiing with your parents, so sometimes dads would take their kids skiing like that - some model like that. And he actually walked me down the aisle. It remains covered in fog in my memories. I had this completely detached sort of feeling that I knew something was flying, I was in terrible pain here, I caught something there, something somewhere, but I don't really know - and suddenly we were outside. And the guy - I just know he said he was from the economics school, he had a blue down jacket, that's all I remember. He asked if I was all right. And he said, I'm coming in. He was letting them through the apartment..." - "That's what I was going to ask, how they got back there." - "He was letting them through an apartment, actually." - "Like through a window?" - "Yeah, yeah. And they were going back to get the girls."