Vladimír Rams

“It was the 7th September, 1977 and I was only seventeen years old and before five in the morning on Monday the secret police came to arrest ten people here in Karlsbad. They were not the criminal police, nor the standard policemen. Those were the secret policemen, as in Karlsbad there was the largest secret police base straight after Prague. They came, only one for some, two for others, it resembles the Wild West chase. They were driving their volha cars on the lawns of Merklin and could not of course figure where people lived; it was a bit of a mess, a chaos. Anyhow I didn’t go to school that day, I went to Vary to ípéčko. Ípéčko is a famous street in Karldbad, the same as Bartolomějská in Prague, and the former criminal police was based there along with the secret police. It was the police centre in Karlsbad. They took us ten boys in individual offices and interrogated us. It was rather unpleasant for seventeen year old boys as they put us under psychical pressure, forced us to say what they needed us to say and wrote that down in the report. Finally after four hours of interrogation they presented the charged and told me to read them and comment. It was half a page of charges, which I read then. They kept repeating clichés like enemy of socialistic regime, enemy of state, which I was totally unprepared to comment. So I just said: ,The only thing I can say is that there are mistakes.‘ And they asked me back: ,What mistakes? You mean in the content?‘ – ‚No, there are grammar mistakes, you can see incorrect punctuation, many mistakes indeed.‘“

“It was my father, who with help of his acquaintances in Prague managed to find the VONS representative. In secret from his friend, who had to be a communist party member in a high function, got a contact address to Petruška Šustrová. I still remember as clear as today that we arrived to Prague, as villagers it took us quite a long while to find it. Then we arrive to the flat, which was just on the ground floor. We knocked, we banged on the door, nothing happened for a long while and then an older lady, who kept chain-smoking, came to welcome us. She took us in and I explained everything to her, even showed he the documentation we kept. And she just looked out of the window and hummed: ,Hmmm.‘ And my dad asked: ,What are you still looking at?‘ – ,Well they´re after you now, that´s clear.‘ And ever since then we could not go back, as it was clear which side we took and where the other side was.“