"Terrible feeling. You don't know whether to shoot yourself or shoot someone else. A removal company simply came to load it up and take it to some warehouse. Young guys got out of the trucks and said, 'Oh, no, we're not going to move away Bunkr. Boss, we're leaving.' So they had to get another company, some morons, and even then it took twenty-four hours to get the people out [of the club]. Because the cops didn't know that the cafe was connected to the Bunkr downstairs. So they were guarding the Bunkr, people were coming into the café, going back down, it [the club] was always crowded. Some of the stuff there was humorous. The executor woman started shouting at the people in the café to stand up of the chairs immediately, and I said, 'One chair for ten crowns, hurry up.' So everyone bought a chair and sat down and was saying, 'I'm sitting on my [chair], what's your point?'"
"Gosh, it was something! People were in the streets [of Ostrava], we were going to the centre. The centre was crazy alive. We were trying to block the passage of tanks and armoured personnel carriers. People sat on the ground and just didn't get up. They were holding hands and stopped the tanks and the armoured personnel carriers. The atmosphere there was turbulent, and for a long time. At that time, when those afternoon tea parties, as they were called, started at five or six, they were singing there that popular song Go home, Ivan, Natasha is waiting for you. That was awesome, too. I remember a slogan or a poem from 1968, I don't know who wrote it. 'Ivan's sitting in a tank, he smells at a hundred yards, he stole toilet paper somewhere and now he's writing home. There is a beautiful girl, Máňa, standing by my tank, she is writing on the tank that I am a swine, that's the end of my letter, your Vanya.' There were loads of such slogans. Then some joker on Wenceslas Square, I think in 1969, but I could be wrong, let out a goose with a sign saying, 'I'm ashamed of my brother.' That was meant to be about [the president] Husák [his name meaning a goose in Czech, trans.]. Or: 'What do we need Russian tanks for? To protect the Czech Bank. We can take care ourselves of the shit we have in there.' I've already given it to someone, there was a letter I had, of course, a copy of it, a statement to the workers by Doctor Kriegel. I had loads of these documents, but then I realised that I wasn't going to be here forever and I had to give it away to people. Because when I pop my clogs, as they say, a bunch of cleaners will come who will have no clue, and throw it into a bin. Whereas it's got to be passed around all the time. And always remembering that democracy isn't for free. That democracy is basically full of blood. Not just war. But democracy has to be watched all the time."
"It came naturally. On the one hand, theoretically I should have hated the fascists as a little boy because they tortured my uncle. But as you grew up and saw one injustice after another around you... The officials´ children, the children of the communists, had privileges, and the other ones didn't. And it escalated every year, the higher class I went to, the more I realized what was going on. I don't know why, whether I was an intelligent kid or a perceptive kid, maybe both, but it just grew with me, and by the time I was fifteen it was done. A communist? Never!" - "So the word resistance started to mean for you..." - "... Yes, the right meaning. That's why, for example, the first time the cops picked me up and showed me a custody order... There were two dudes standing there, one was a prosecutor and the other was some State Security major. And the prosecutor says: 'Make a deal with the comrade here and you won't go into custody, we'll tear it up.' I said: 'Look, as I have good information, there's dinner at six o'clock in the detention.' I just didn't think about it at all. Just no. No matter what, never. And that shapes you. It shapes you. It just goes on and on, then nobody breaks you. The moment you find it in yourself [the strength] to say no for the first time."
Richard Julius Nemčok was born on 7 February 1954 in Ostrava-Vítkovice and was christened the same year. In 1955, according to his words, the communists murdered his father, but to this day this event has not been investigated and resolved. Richard‘s brother was born a posthumous child, and his mother, who had to take care of the family financially, decided to send Richard to his grandmother in the Sudetenland, where he stayed until he started primary school back in Ostrava. From childhood Richard was inclined towards weapons and aspired to become a paratrooper. Between the ages of fifteen and eighteen he completed a parachute training, but did not join the army because of the hatred he felt for the communist regime from an early age. When the occupation troops arrived in Czechoslovakia in August 1968, Richard and his friends painted signs with lime around Ostrava and even tried unsuccessfully to set fire to a Soviet tank. Richard Nemčok was already going on tramping expeditions to the countryside and he considers Ostrava tramping community to be quite radical, as many of its members, like Richard, owned guns. Later he began working as a prop maker, but continued to be in strong active opposition to the communist state administration. Around 1972 he was first arrested and imprisoned for two years in Horní Slavkov for parasitism (social offence) and damaging socialist property. He served his second imprisonment for two and a half years in Mírov and after his release on 28 November 1978, he decided not to let himself imprisoned for a third time. He crossed the Sněžka crest into Poland, where he participated in Solidarity activitioes and was active during the Polish state of emergency in 1981. From there, with the help of French intelligence service, he flew with a false passport to Vienna, from where he and an intelligence officer named Philip made their way by land to Paris. He served in the French Foreign Legion from 1982 to 1984 and took part in military missions in Chad and Djibouti before being discharged due to a leg injury. From France, he also travelled briefly to Italy and the United States, where he worked as keeper of an apartment building in Queens in New York. After his return to France in 1989, the situation in Czechoslovakia was already turbulent, and so in December 1989 he headed back to his homeland by train. In the post-revolutionary times, he saw great potential in premises market, so he started looking for a place to build an underground club and finally opened Bunkr at 2 Lodecká Street on November 17, 1991. Within a few years it became one of the top five music clubs in the world which hosted world-class stars. At the same time, however, it was a thorn in many people‘s flesh and, despite winning an appeal, the club was unlawfully displaced on 21 January 1997. At the time of recording in 2022, Richard Nemčok was still living in Prague.
