“And when I married, I started working as an editor at Orbis, a publishing house. I was responsible for the section that dealt with travel books and picture books and the such. Except that soon afterwards there was the trial with Horáková, and there was a petition making the rounds, in which everyone demanded her death. It was kind of forced, the regime wanted to make everyone sign it. Well, I... not only did I not sign it, but I went around the people in Orbis, asking, you’re willing to sign this? Well, I soon received my reward. I got the sack and soon found myself as a worker at Poldi in Kladno, operating this big lathe, a vertical lathe, which you had to go up three steps to reach.”
“When the five-year period of the Charter was coming up, that is 77 plus five is 82, so the last spokesman at the time was Vašek Malý, Václav Malý, who’s a bishop now. Well, back then he was mashed up at an interrogation. Then a student fell into a pit in Brno, and it was said that he’d been thrown in because of sympathising [with Charter 77]. They shot one person dead in Slovakia, and at that point Anička and I said to ourselves: Well, this won’t do! So I went to see Vašek Malý, and I told him, if you don’t have anyone else to pass it on to, I’ll take it. The Charter spokesman was, by unwritten law, to hold tenure for a year. So as to take turns. So I started as Charter spokesman. And together with me also Anička Marvanová and Vláďa Rys, say, one time it was the parents, the father of Václav Malý, so we would meet up like that and prepare things.”
“Say, one time I wanted to set out at five a.m., to perhaps leave before they set up watch for the day, and I had with me... I know, I had a letter that I had been given by Josef Zvěřina. It contained the minutes from a meeting of the Communist Party regional committee in Ostrava. How he had come about it, who gave it to him, I don’t know. And now I was supposed to use it somehow. I had it in my pocket, on tracing paper, folded in my handkerchief. And so, when I set off at five a.m., I kept feeling as if someone was following me. So I marched off to Legions Bridge, to Jirásek Bridge. Well, and then when I sat myself down somewhere in Smíchov, the gentlemen were already waiting for me there, they nabbed me and away we went.”
“Well, they sent us all, all three of us, to the garrisons in Motol. Because the Motol depot was a huge place which mainly housed the SS and the German army. So we were supposed to have the place there surrounded as if. I myself was by the road with a machine gun that I had no idea how to crew, but there was one Russian partisan with me, and I was supposed to pass him the bullets, the ammunition belt. But that never happened, we didn’t fire a single shot. But otherwise there was lots of shooting all over the whole Motol ridge.”
“It was the traditional combination of a local confidant, which was the local Communist who lived in our house. He was very suspicious... the poorly-educated type of person. So the combination of him sending reports on a daily basis, I reckon. And apart from that there were the interrogations, and also that they followed me around... So, anyway, the way I had it was that I was mostly locked up for forty-eight hours. Variously at stations - in Bartholomew Street, Smíchov, Ruzyně. There I was actually held for two forty-eighters in a row. They nabbed me on Monday and locked me up in a cell with some marriage fraudster, who was a decent person otherwise. Well, and after those two days they released me as law required. That is, they took me to the entrance, gave me my ID card, and I went out. There were two gentlemen waiting for me there - identify yourself, they said! But please, I just... Identify yourself! So they nabbed me again, took me to Žižkov to the police station in Lupáč Street. I underwent formal questioning, but to no avail, and they locked me up for another forty-eighter again, back to Ruzyně. Except this time they put me in a different cell, one in which there were some dissident friends. It was a cell with about eight people in it. And I was pretty ill by that time, so on the one hand I coveted by my fellow prisoners, but on the other hand I was used as something of a ‘hammer of witches’, as they say. Look, you’ve got an old man here - what are you doing to us here.”
Prof. PhDr. Radim Palouš, Dr. H. c., was born on 6 November 1924 in Prague. His father worked as a journalist at the Prague-based German-language daily Die Prager Presse from 1921 to 1939. Already as a child Radim Palouš had an affinity for sports, he was a member of the Scouts and of Sokol. In 1938 he participated in a manifestation against demobilising. He passed his matriculation exam in 1943. At the end of the war, as a member of one resistance group, he joined the Prague Revolt. In 1945-1948 he studied at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, learning philosophy under Jan Patočka (his dissertation was Masaryk‘s Political Youthhood) - this and his deep fascination with the ideas of T. G. Masaryk negatively impacted the subsequent years of his life in undemocratic Czechoslovakia. He voiced his disapproval with the death penalty for Milada Horáková in 1950 and consequently spent several years as a worker at the Poldi Steelworks in Kladno. He was later employed as a teacher, in 1957 he degree in chemistry from the Faculty of Natural Sciences of the University of Pedagogics, where he then worked as an assistant. He took an interest in pedagogics, but he himself was banned from teaching in 1959. He received a higher doctorate with a work on the philosophy of education titled The School of Modern Times in 1967. In the 1970s he actively participated in and organised „flat seminars“, he was one of the first to sign Charter 77. He was subsequently limited to working in manual occupations. In 1982-1983 he was the spokesman of Charter 77. In November 1989 he was a co-founder of the Civic Forum and he helped establish the new government of the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic. In 1990-1994 he held the post of Rector of Charles University. He was titled doctor honoris causa by several European and even non-European universities. The lifelong achievements of this eminent philosopher, pedagogue, Komenius expert were recognised in 1997 by the state-awarded Order of T. G. Masaryk. He raised two sons with his wife Anna. Prof. Radim Palouš lives in Prague.
