Ing. Petr Náhlík

"Then there was 28 October 1989, when we repeated the August episode, which [means] we called demonstrations in Karlovy Vary, Pilsen and I think even in Klatovy and Sušice. And by that time we had probably pissed off the regime a lot, so they had already rounded up people like me, so I was called in to give an explanation. My wonderful wife packed me a snack and a toothbrush, as we already knew from those dissident stories. I [thus] of course pissed them off in the interrogation, what the hell. Well, I told them there, 'My wife has known you since 1979, so she equipped me.' I classically shut down the interrogation, which was probably the best method. Then they detained me. It was interesting in that after the revolution, when they were looking for the car they were taking us in, they couldn't find it. It was something like a tin body for a multi-car or just some small vehicle. They put about three of us in it, each of us separately, like in a dungeon, so we had no idea who was in there, so we kept quiet. We had no idea where they were taking us. I have a fairly good sense of direction, so I understood that they were not taking us to Bory, but to Karlovy Vary, because there was no other straight road from Pilsen. We were taken to the Vykmanov prison between Jáchymov and Ostrov nad Ohří, a name that is rather famous as a 1950s prison camp. So we lived in a normal prison. We were detained there for twenty-four or forty-eight hours. There were more of us. I know only about the engineer Jaroslav Cuhr, who is today's [now former] chairman of the Confederation of Political Prisoners in Pilsen. At that time I knew him as a dissident and a classmate of my mother's from the construction industry. And [then] of course they let us go separately."

"I started going backpacking quite young. And at one of the first potlachs I went to, at the Zichovice lake - it was a potlach of the Fort Jatky settlement - I met older tramps who were eighteen years older than me. And they said, 'If you have the next weekend off, come to us at the Montana settlement in Šumava near Dešenice and you can help us with the wood. Well, so I went there and I was the only one who went there, otherwise there were people from the settlements who went there, of course. And I started to go tramping with these guys, even though they were my father's age. So we went to Budejovice and opposite the station we went to the Hotel Malše. It was only then that I learned that we were going to the Fort Hazard settlement cottage of the Zlatý klíč tramp settlement, whose members were Wabi and Miki Ryvola. And that, of course, is a huge experience for a young boy. I then responded to that experience [by], of course, bragging everywhere among my peers that I had been to the Ryvola brothers' cottage and settlement. And the most compelling response was [that] from my friend Shorty: 'Well, that's great, but what do we get out of it that you were at the Ryvola brothers' cottage?' Well, by that time we had gotten into samizdat, and as a result I took the question 'What do we get out of it?' seriously, and my then-girlfriend, now wife, and I began to think about publishing complete songbooks of the Ryvola brothers' songs."