Pavel Lagner

“I never learnt the actual reason and I never found out why it was me that they were interested in, because I think that I was not exceptional in any way, I did not make my opinions known loudly, I had never, until studying at DAMU, signed anything, no declarations or anything, I think I was just a normal, regular kind of person who just went to church regularly and wasn’t a member of the SSM. But there had to be thousands, tens of thousands of people like that. And in 1990 I thought I would go to Pardubice or wherever it was, I don’t know, but I wanted to go have a look in the archives to find out. But then I changed my mind and told myself that I didn’t actually want to know because I didn’t want to learn names that could possibly hurt me a lot and that perhaps they were until this day, those people, among my friends, and I didn’t want to, if it was, maybe not, but if it was one of my friends, and they still were a friend to me at the time, I didn’t want to lose them. Because that, the pressure afterwards, the… the weekly interrogations were so awful that if someone gave in to them, I already forgave them a long time ago because if it had gone on longer, I would’ve given in as well. You can’t withstand a thing like that.”

“There was pressure on us from the National Theatre, and, well, only the moment when, I didn’t realise for a long while, even though people had been shouting that there were police vans in the back, that from Národní třída, that it had been closed off, I didn’t realise for a long time what kind of trouble it actually was, I simply thought we would annoy the cops with their plexiglass… that we would ring our keys, sing the anthem, all that, and that we would just turn it around and go. And on the contrary I was actually surprised thanks to the fifteenth of November when they beat us up like dogs, that no one was doing anything on the seventeenth. For quite a while I thought that, and, well… suddenly there were voices that they were pushing us from behind, and when the pressure became unbearable we started running through the passage, right, and I thought I’d escape to Mikulandská street and that we’d squeeze through there unnoticed. Well, that didn’t work out. There they counted up everything, for everyone and added all the stuff that had happened before. Well. And at that point… the shock was even greater. That they didn’t let us leave on purpose. For me, that crossed the line so much for me, the protest was several times, it got this horrible so many times, I felt that it was gradually getting worse, that their, their fury was getting so intense that I thought it was borderline hysteria, I had no idea what to do, I was just so furious I felt like… crying, I sat down on the stairs of Slavia, the café Slavia, and there… some of my classmates showed up and I told them that I simply could not keep studying at DAMU under these circumstances.”