Věroslav Němec

"The political pressure was not particularly great, I told you that I published Klement Slavický without the slightest problem. Nobody even asked if it should or should not be. Simply Slavický's etudes were published. Although I have to say, I did have a problem once, once. It must have been in the mid-80s, I published a book called Klavírní prvouka by Ludmila Šimková, and there were folk songs in the simplest arrangement for piano for children. And there were texts, we did not pay much attention then, so there were lyrics of, let's say, religious songs. And nobody thought that it could bother anyone, but it bothered someone. A comrade from Brno spoke up. Her letter began with the words: 'I am the daughter of a weaver' and how she was offended by this publication, that there were angels, that there was God, that there was even a devil and a parish priest. And she demanded that the editor, that is me, be exemplarily punished. And so they called me to the director's office, and the director, the artistic deputies, and the economic deputies looked at it, and to their credit, I must say that the director said: 'Well, after all these are folk songs, what does this woman want us to do.' So, it was not even heroic, it just went through."

"We listened to the Voice of America dutifully, we even found out only from it that Ivan Medek was there. Who would we have found out from, right? So, we listened to it quite dutifully. And we listened to it on the 17th of November in 1989. By then we were already showered, getting ready to go to bed, and we turned on the radio – and now Ivan Medek was reporting what was happening in Prague. Of course, we were wide-eyed, because we lived across the bridge from the National Theatre, and we heard some shouting, some noise, so my wife and I got up, got dressed, went to Národní třída, and we got there, apparently after the cops raged there, so there were shoes lying around, hats lying around, scarves lying around in the street. It was horrible and we were staring at it and then we said we are actually stupid, what are we doing there when we have kids at home, right, if we got knocked off there, so we went back home again. In the meantime, we saw the red berets coming and we did not know what they were, we were just very naive, very stupid in every way. And then we were enjoying it all, and I know Ivan Medek, either on the seventeenth or the eighteenth, was saying on the radio: 'Well, the Communists came to power in February 1948, and on the seventeenth of November, 1989, they are finished too.' And I thought he was exaggerating, and he was not."