Věra Náhlíková

„A week later we had this tramp gathering. Apart from writing some samizdat literature, there were also competitions. Because tramps had also had literary competitions. That’s what the magazines we published had been based on. And one of these competitions was supposed to take place in Branov, in the ferry of Ota Pavel. We rented a ferry; I don’t remember anymore who had managed to do that… So, we just met there, the Saturday following the Palach Week. Many people from Prague came and we were there as well. There were about twenty-five of us. And we had kind of a literary meeting there. And because it was a literary meeting and because it was in Branov, we also copied short stories of Ota Pavel, for example A Race Through Prague. It was those short stories that hadn’t been published in time but were really dense and had a lot to say. And so, we took these short stories there to read them, since it was Branov which is closely connected with Ota Pavel. And as we met there after the Palach Week, we found out that we all had attended various days of the demonstration. And the kids started to show each other their bruises. Some had them yellow, some green, some red and some purple… depending on the day they got beaten up. That was really strange. Especially in the atmosphere following the Palach Week, which somehow started and somehow ended – and nothing; we were reading the short stories by Ota Pavel and I remember that we all started crying. It’s still moving for me to this day. It was very emotional. We knew something had to happen, something had to be done. That it couldn’t go on like that.”

„And I copied the leaflet [with an invitation to festival Porta in Olomouc] and handed it out to all my tramp friends, which of course didn’t go unnoticed by the higher authorities. So, in June 1979 I was subjected to my first interrogation, when I had to give an oral explanation here in Pilsen of the nature of the leaflet, where I had gotten it, who had given it to me, where I had been distributing it… In the end they basically threatened me that I couldn’t attend the Porta festival, that they were not allowing me to, and they recommended I wouldn’t even show up, because if they met me there it wouldn’t end up well for me. Well, back then I had already experienced some police controls like this, so they already had me filed, because it regularly happened that a yellow-white car of the Public Security stopped you at a railway station, police officers jumped out of it and controlled all the tramps, writing down our IDs and information about where we were headed, why and so on. Also, when there were campfires taking place, they came saying it had been forbidden and that we had to disband, and they checked all of us again.”

they established a base there following 1968, which they called ‘Na Patě’. It was between Aš and in the direction of Cheb. A large multi-kilometer area that they surrounded with a concrete wall and where the Soviet soldiers lived. And then they also lived a little North of Aš where they had also established a base. In short, apart from the numerous Czech barracks, suddenly several more Russian barracks emerged. These were really Russian soldiers only. And it was strange because it was like an occupation of an already occupied territory. And they really stayed there until 1990. And I remember how we later got into the complex after the Soviets had left and we were surprised to find small houses and gardens… Behind the high wall, where a normal person couldn’t get, they had lived a completely normal life there, a city inside of a city.”