Richard Novák

"When the Soviets came in sixty-eight, then after that in the seventies that normalization was established and we all had to go through screenings. I was the soloist of an opera here [in Brno], quite acclaimed, I would say. And there was the boss of the opera and the representative of the party organization. I was never anywhere. I was only a passive member of the ROH, as the boss liked to say - not even in the union of friends, nothing. Well and the boss always covered for me, when he said: He is important to the group, he is an example for some of those people, who are maybe party members, but are not so hard-working [laughter]. And I always said, you know what, I will always delay you a little and I told them, what I had just told you a little while ago. And I said, the chairman of the commission, the most important person, I said, you know what Zdeňek, who it was? That was my father, the assistant of the party chairman, that was my father. Well, and what I should I tell you after that. And it was finished. And so there, where the people are able to still act like people, you can come to an agreement. Where there are only party members, who are fulfilling the orders that they get, then it is disgusting. I think, that it did not bring Gottwald any pleasure, when they hanged Slánský. But he did it, because he listened and he did not have any courage. It is a moral matter. I cannot judge the people, who were in the party, because I do not know their history, what they had attempted and how they had been threatened. The methods of State Security were terrible. Thankfully I never experienced it."

"And then we experienced such a night, when they were running. That road, which went from Dačice to the west, to Jindřichův Hradec, well there were explosions and horrible crashes there. The whole night we stood there and in the morning we saw, that the Russians were going from Dačice to Telč, and so we set out to Dačice and welcomed them. That welcome was incredible for us. You can hardly compare it to anything. I know, how we were all so shaken up! And we did not see the problems, which later came with the Russians, but back then it was something amazing."

“We have a summer house in Nová Říše, and I had agreed with a bricklayer that on November 17th we would place concrete floor in the attic. The bricklayer was a young guy from Slavonice and the weather was quite freezing by the morning. I went to pick him up with my car and his mom told me: ‘He is not here, he had gone to Klášter to see his girlfriend and since the weather was so terrible, he had phoned me that he would stay there overnight.’ I thus went together with his mother to Klášter to get him. Then we worked together on placing the concrete on the floor for the whole day. I was bringing the buckets with concrete from the mixer up to the attic to him. It was already five o’clock and we were downstairs eating and Svobodná radio told us that they were still in Národní Street. We stayed there with my wife until Sunday. It was only on Monday that we went to Brno and things started moving forward. Meetings were organized in the theatre, and we invited some regional chairman, or whoever he was, and some woman, too. And the officials from the theatre, who were members of the Revolutionary Trade Union Movement, they did not want to deal with it too much anymore. They approached me and asked whether I would take the lead. Normally, I would not feel like doing it. But I thought that something was happening here and that I had to be present. The theatre was full and we had that meeting, and I gave them some space to say what they had to say, even though people were bellowing at them. Somebody then called me, it was the boss. He called me as if to the wing of the stage, and I went there and he said that they had just announced that the government had resigned. And I went back to the stage and I said: ‘It has just been announced that the government had resigned.’ There was an explosion, an awful explosion broke out in the theatre. Somebody started singing the national anthem, and I joined in, but after the first verse, I could not sing anymore.”

“Well, people now say how bad it is. But see, back then, even the top soloists’ salaries were poor. We did not mind, because we wanted to do it when it was possible, but nobody earned significantly more money. There was a rule that when I was a guest singer in some theatre, I was allowed to receive a compensation which was thirty percent of my salary, and therefore the decisive factor was what my own theatre was paying me. When I sang in a concert, the rate was twenty percent. So one of the things that happened was that I sang during the Prague Spring with the Czech Philharmonic and I had twenty percent of my salary, and thus I received 760 Crowns for my singing. Next to me there was a German baritone from the West, who sang for seventy thousand during that evening. He told us that he felt very sorry about it, and he said that they did not know what to do about it because they were not able to do anything.”

“As soon as the end of the war came… if it had taken some time - but it was immediately, immediately, the people immediately felt that the pressure would subside, that the Germans were no longer threatening them and that the Gestapo was not ever present anymore. Clashes ensued. One day, it was about three days later after May 9th, a group of German refugees appeared on the road from Slavonice. Several old men, but mainly women and children. They were led by one robust woman. She had a certificate from the mayor of Slavonice. His name was Augustýn, he was formerly a worker from the brick factory in Vydří. He was thus well-known in Vydří. They came and they explained to the prior that Augustýn had sent them and that he asked him to let them spend the night in the arcades of the cloister and also to give them some food, because they were then to continue their journey all the way to Jihlava. But see what happened: well, they were indeed in a poor state, they were a desolate group of people. There was a camp kitchen, and our mom thus cooked a kettle of soup for them. They prepared accommodation for them, I think that there were still some straw mattresses there. There was straw left behind by German soldiers who had been there as sappers and who had been accommodated in the German school. What happened: some youths from the village came there at night, claiming that they were Germans, and they picked this large woman who led the group. They were carrying her around on a wagon and beating her and showing what heroes they were. It was nasty, those people were desolate, nobody knew whether they had murdered somebody or sent somebody to gas chambers. They even had that letter, the certificate, from the mayor.”