Jan Potměšil

"Basically, we were saying goodbye and I had promised to go - I knew that the Brno HaDivadlo and Husa Na provázku theatres would come to Žižkov. Or more precisely to the Na Chmelnici club. So I was heading there, I was going by tram, and suddenly I saw these armoured personnel carriers coming from barracks - from the military equipment garage in Žižkov, which belongs to the Ministry of the Interior. I saw armoured personnel carriers painted only yellow and white as VB (Veřejná bezpečnost), Public Security. At that moment, I got hysterical: Here we go. Because I realised they were really going to National Street. So we turned around and with the guys from Brno we went back. At the moment there I experienced - when it had just finished - horror. That the regime decided to use military equipment. I mean, equipment of the Ministry of the Interior, sure, but we knew this well from the military service. That it has a cannon, it has a machine gun, it has eight people sitting in it who have machine guns. Suddenly they're going somewhere, on National Street, apparently. They also had nets with them, which they then spread out. Then I saw some pictures that they had been really pushing the people away from the river to make the massacre even bigger, so that the people would have nowhere to run. Organized violence against their own citizens. Then, when I saw the National Street as a battlefield... There were pieces of clothes, sweaters, jackets, blood stains. And those broken, humiliated people. What was that supposed to mean? We go to school, we want to study, we have plans, and our own regime beats us up like this, thrashes us, humiliates us completely. And in fact, nothing was going on, there was no violence or destruction. There were only calls for new elections and dialogue. And for freedom. The major message was that there was no way it could end up like this: everyone must get the information about it. The regime must not sweep this under the carpet. A frantic effort towards... Figure out what to do to make oneself useful, to help to make a change. That someone will be held responsible."

"It happened once that someone jumped on me one day during Palach Week, into that group of people. He was dressed like me, he was in plain clothes, he pulled me out and started shouting, 'I've got him, I've got him.' He took me to the corner of Jindrišská Street, hands on the wall, spread legs, searched me for weapons. I was hit a couple more times with a baton. Then they took us to Školská Street to the police station, where they threw us into a cage. I spent the whole afternoon there. Then I realised I was having a performance at the Disk theatre that evening. I begged to be allowed to be interrogated earlier, that I was having duties afterwards, a performance. I was scolded and nothing happened. So I missed the performace. That could've been a problem and trouble. There were people who had to go home, colleagues who were ready. It was already a professional scene at that point. And I wasn't there. But fortunately, there were teachers at DAMU who were of the same opinion and thinking like us. In the end, nothing came of it. We replaced the performance, we played it another time. Actually, nothing happened. That was a message to me, too, that the group of people who thought the same way was maybe bigger than we thought, and maybe even bigger than the regime thought. I have to take my hat off, nobody fussed about that. Maybe they were on Wenceslas Square too, I don't know."

"It once happened to me that someone lent me a book by a young author who had written a book called Catch-22, [Joseph] Heller wrote it. And I borrowed it from someone and it was also on some kind of a list, it means it was banned. And I was carrying it home in a bag. And by coincidence, I was waiting for a bus at a stop somewhere, and I put it on the ground, and the bus came, and I jumped on it fearing he would close the door, and I left the bag there. And I remember the fright that I was feeling myself. That I was scared that somebody would find the bag, that the police would find it, that they would find the book, that I might have had my papers in there, maybe also my ID. And they would find out who had [the book]. That I would actually be prosecuted because of it and so on. But because of something that basically, all over the world, all over the planet, has been rated as quality literature, which is one of the best or among the top literary works ever written. And I'm just saying that as an example. That at that moment, I was dealing with it, for about three weeks, that it is a big issue, that I'm going to be in trouble at school and so on. Finally, luckily, I got a call from a man I'd never seen or known in my life, and he said he had the book, he had the bag, he had my papers. And that he was very sorry he hadn´t called because he wanted to read it too."

"Then I finally came out of the coma. And there were a lot of doctors and [staff] around me. I didn't know what had happened, completely blank head, black hole. And I thought I had a terrible headache, that I'd hit my head somewhere or something. And suddenly, luckily, my parents were there, too, they let them in. And that's when my dad uttered one bare sentence, but it was absolutely brilliant, because he said, "Václav Havel is already president." And everything clicked into place, as if he had used a magical trick for my head. Suddenly everything came back to me and I remembered it all in a second."

"It turned out that I can exist normally, live normally. And I have a wonderful family, I found the woman of my life, I have two healthy boys and I can do the work I want to do. And most of all, I'm happy, because actually what I wanted or what our parents' generation, maybe even our grandparents' generation longed for, has come true. That we have again after actually a long time - we counted it recently, it was forty-seven years that we lived in oppression or in those regimes, if you take the Protectorate regime and then the communist regime. Of those hundred years of the existence of Czechoslovakia, or of the Czech Republic, forty-seven years were actually under those circumstances. So I'm happy that at that moment we, my parents' generation and others, but also our children's generation could breathe in that freedom again, and that I could be there."

"I get terribly irritated when someone sort of questions or says, 'Well, they don't know what they want,' or, 'It's not enough that they only want this or that.' In the beginning, against the regime, everybody knew that they had the resources of the Ministry of the Interior. That means not only batons and plexiglas shields and helmets, but that they had guns, that they had armoured personnel carriers, that they had the whole army at their disposal if they needed them."