Helena Medková

“People from Prague dictated us texts on the phone, we recorded them and when I got back from my work at half past eight, we had a dinner and then we copied those texts. First we copied them on a typewriter that Ivan took from Prague, then he bought a better typewriter and in the early 1980s we got our first computer, bought for us by František Janouch in Sweden. The computer was brought to us by fourteen or fifteen-year-old son of professor Janouch and he also made the machine to write in Czech. I worked on my computer while Ivan tried to use the texts on the radio but not only that; following an agreement with Pavel Tigrid and other exiles, we sent the texts to about seventy or eighty addresses all over the world, to East European channels, expat organisations, libraries, archives… to all the places where this information might contribute to the improvement of the Czech opposition abroad.”

“The position of the informer on Czechoslovakia for Czechoslovakia was in fact against the statute of Voice of America. Nevertheless, Ivan succeeded in establishing this function. Voice of America was to disseminate information on America without any sabotage activities; that is why Ivan was under the control of specialists trained to listen to Voice of America in fifty languages that the channel broadcasted in. These people did not necessarily spoke the language but the supervised the speaker and they objected to Ivan that his tone is not right, that it is too excited, full of hate – wasn’t there a sabotage in it?”

“Besides the fact that I was a teacher, I also helped my husband, who really did emigrate with the conviction that he must do something about the bad situation at home. Because when at home, he had neither the options nor the strength for it - he had that nasty incident with the State Security officers, who beat him up and left him in a forest. So he got in touch with radio stations abroad, and he maintained communications with the Chartists in Prague, and he passed their materials on to the media, to Western journalists. That is, with regard to the technical equipment available to us in the 1980s, we recorded the texts on improvised tape recorders connecting - illegally in fact - to the telephone. And in the evening, when I came home from work, we’d write out a clean version, copy it , translate it, put it in envelopes, send it to various media offices, institutions. We couldn’t have done it if we hadn’t had so many friends all over the world, who were partly emigrants from the many waves of emigration. There were Czechs living abroad who’d emigrated before Hitler - Pavel Tigrid - there were Czechs who’d emigrated before the Communists - Karel Schwarzenberg and his family. There were people in Sweden, England, America, even Australia, and all of them had just one thing on their mind. When I asked my husband, as a young woman in love: ‘Dearie, what’s on your mind?’, he’d say: ‘A change of regime.’”

“The Fifties - I’m starting school. And a big change is taking place because I start to realise - and it’s very much emphasised at home - that the things we say at home are not said outside, and the things they say at school are not true. That means that a six-year-old child, actually much younger than that, is living in schizophrenia. There are two things, they are irreconcilable, and you have to watch out or someone will tell on you. I remember that a lot of things were said in whispers at home. That is, my parents spoke about something, but in a way so that the children wouldn’t hear it. But you can imagine that children listen hardest precisely when their parents whisper, right? So, for example, as a preschooler I thought that Moscow was a rude word because it was only ever whispered. I remember that they spoke of political trials. Those were the Fifties. I know that when I’d finished my first year at school, we went to visit an uncle in Moravia. My uncle was a farmer, but they’d just taken all his horses, his machines, everything he had, and the cooperative was chaired by his former stable hand. I remember the year 1953, Stalin died in the Soviet Union and Gottwald died here. And we had to recite poems about how sad we were and how much we missed both those comrades. The school took us regularly to the cinema, they showed us Soviet films about the war, so we saw more than enough combat engagements, bloody battles between the good Russians and the evil Germans on that black-and-white screen.”

“And then, one summer day, my parents were on holiday, my sister and I were home alone, we heard on the radio that the Russians had arrived, that they’d occupied us, that there were tanks in Prague, and I know that my first thought was: ‘So now it’s our turn. Everyone’s been through a war, now there’ll be war here.’ And suddenly, I knew what I should do, right that moment I grabbed a bag and went to buy some bread. Because your mind’s working, war is coming. And really, there was already a queue of people waiting to buy bread. My parents rushed home from their holiday, and then we sat from dawn till dusk the whole family by the radio, because for the first time in my life the radio was speaking the truth. And although it was tense and sorrowful, those were grand moments. Because we felt that now, finally, the truth was being told. But that only lasted a short time.”