Roman Matula

"One or two bands played something, then we were supposed to play, we started playing. And while we were playing, a local National Security Corps officer, an older guy, marched in and said, 'Under the stage!' Like, tell us to stop playing. So we finished the band, what he wanted, and he said, 'This action is forbidden, not allowed, forbidden. Break it up!' That's what he announced and everybody booed, right. 'What are they saying? What are they saying? I don't understand them.' And we say, 'We don't understand you. You're supposed to say it into the microphone!' We were joking. He got on stage, said it into the microphone, repeated it, and everybody had the same reaction. "Kiss our ass! And so we're behind him and we're running away and stuff like that. And he goes, 'End of report', and he goes and gets off the stage. We started to play and the people made like a circle around him and danced around him like and he went like to the exit and like a circle danced wildly around him, so he got so confused, he couldn't find the door, then in court, he described it very dramatically in the notes somehow. And then he came out, he got out somehow, he wriggled out, stood there looking sadly at the ground, didn't he. The event went on, and gradually more of these local SS men of some sort came in, and when there were more, five or so, they started bothering the people who came out of the courtroom. We played on normally and they started, who came out, that somebody would come out occasionally, so checking IDs and stuff and not letting them back in. So like that, there were already a few people out and they couldn't come in, yeah, some of them even got taken somewhere, some police car came and some of them got like detained and taken away."

"I was looking for these "Máničkas" since the '68. We used to live in that mill, actually, so there was a, behind the mill, there was a café, it was called, it was a pub where the young people used to go. It's still, I think, when young people go there, nowadays it's a disco. We used to go there then when I was an adult and the youngsters used to go there and suddenly in the '80s I was watching like crazy from the garden across the magnolia trees, suddenly there were boys with long hair in denim walking along the pavement and I was looking at it like an apparition, I loved it, it was just like a new thing. I was like looking at it so intently and I immediately stopped going to the barber and wearing my hair long too. But then they disappeared, didn't they, with the normalization, they suddenly stopped being there, like in that little town, they kind of either normalized or moved away, maybe somebody got arrested, they just stopped being there."