Ivo Medek

"Proud of the fact that I... well, liquidated, I can't say... The first anniversary after the occupation in 1969 - 21 August - demonstrations all over Prague. Now there's often a photograph published of demonstrators in Wenceslas Square... And a group of people standing on the roof of a tram stop, there was still a tram there then. That third guy, the one tossing victory signs in the light pants—that’s me. In the evening, they pushed us off Wenceslas Square onto Pavlák. And there it was—tear gas, cops saying the dogs from Pazderna were coming, the riot units. Then rumors about tanks rolling in. The whole thing just started feeling ridiculous. Cops all huddled together with their shields. A few troublemakers gleefully chucking cobblestones. Then someone had the bright idea to build a barricade. But the tram drivers didn't want to put the tram down, that it would be filled with cobblestones, that they were materially responsible. So they're gonna roll the scaffolding from the building into the street. Nobody could get that off, and there are tanks coming from Benešov. And I thought: 'This is absolutely useless and unnecessary. And as I was walking from the Tylák (square) in a roundabout way, two boys about your age were carrying boxes of tomatoes from the greengrocer's and putting them across the street. I said: 'Boys, what are you doing?' 'A barricade.' 'Well, a car will run over this. You'd have to put up these gas lamps here, you'd just have to climb up on it and pull the stich,' which we did. 'Look, there's a nice little ditch. Don't you go to Yugoslav partisan films? What do you do with a trench?" 'We’ll move it to the side.' We used those tomato crates to make armbands that, in the dark, looked like those of the auxiliary Public Security patrols. The red tomatoes almost looked like their emblems. And since there was a kerosene lamp marking the ditch, painted red, I took it - I didn’t want some car to fall in there. I waited for the first tank, and sure enough, it went straight into the ditch."

"Just like all of my age. Imagine that there was basically nothing to eat. There were food stamps, but there was rarely what you went out to buy. There were always problems with being sent to get margarine and the clerk saying, 'Hey, that's what they put soap for these days. Do you want soap or nothing?' And now the risk was - would I get scolded at home for being so stupid as to buy soap instead of margarine? And that's pretty much how it went with everything."