Karel Polanský

“I bought newspapers as a student at the time because there were interesting articles there; already in March 1968 they published Ivan Sviták’s letter to the prosecutor general, requesting that he re-investigate the death of Jan Masaryk. I read that with interest, and there were other articles as well. I liked to listen to the radio, watch television, read newspapers. In short, I completely changed the way I approached political matters. Before that I had regarded them as boring, changeless and repetitive things with no dynamic, and suddenly I found it fascinating. I started to learn things about the fifties, and back then I realised that if there is no competition to the Communists, if there are no competing parties, no plurality, there’s no chance. But there was no alternative, you either adhered to the original opinions and kept to the old guard, or you took to the new, progressive one, although I didn’t trust Dubček much any more by then either. Even so, I reckoned that was the lesser evil and it would no doubt be worth it. The half year that it lasted was full of a kind of euphoria, even though I was occupied with other matters as well because I was ending my studies at university.”

“I wanted to get somewhere to Příkopy [Na příkopě Street - trans.] via Old Town Square. But I found myself in Železná Street and saw that it was blocked by the militia. There weren’t many people there, mostly in the background. I reckoned nothing bad could happen, so I’ll just ask if they’ll let me pass through. When he saw I had the tricolour and a black band, he immediately asked where I was going, and he demanded to see my ID card. I didn’t have it, so I started to back out, but he was faster. He caught me, he was bigger than me, some 185 centimetres or so, a bulky fellow, a kind of daddy militiaman. He gave one to remember and then passed me on to his mates. They took me to the Party’s municipal committee. There were others sitting on the bench, who’d been detained as I was. I realised that the cage was closing. That it wasn’t the kind of demonstration that I could come home from, like in 1968, but that there could be consequences from it. And so I asked myself if there was any point? Perhaps it was cowardice speaking in me. I don’t know, but I took the tricolour and the black thing, so they wouldn’t have any evidence, and I threw them under the bench. Later, when the cops questioned me, I claimed, which was true, that I was on my way to Tuzex [a shop with foreign goods - trans.] to buy some tobacco. I had two bons [voucher] in my purse, that was how much it cost at the time. Later, when I was in Ruzyně, they asked: ‘Didn’t you read any newspapers?’ And I said that I wasn’t interested in that kind of thing.”