Jiří Sozanský

“The atmosphere here in August was as thick as soup. It was clear that something would happen. But I wasn’t one of the prescient kind, I just listened to the chirping, and I was one of the dunces who had complete faith in Dubček’s group and cheered for them. At the time I was doing a holiday job in Kladno. If I said before that I’d never met such dolts as at the construction sites, in Kladno the situation was quite the opposite. There were people there who had been doing forced labour since the fifties, following some kind of punishment. Mostly Prague people, who enriched the Kladno locals - who were mostly staunch Communists - with their intellect and outlook. And the surprising thing was that I found then that workers bought books, read newspapers, held debates, and had opinions. I experienced that for the first time in my life.”

“Prague was actually kind of a cultural ghetto, and it had all the advantages and disadvantages of a ghetto. The advantage was that people supported each other, relied on each other; the disadvantage was that negative news spread quickly and was taken as fact. And over time there was more and more of the negative. And that kind of made you feel like you had your back to the wall, that there’s nothing to be done, that you’re helpless. And that wasn’t completely true. So a lot of people often just gave up their fights with those who had the power, simply because they thought it was hopeless. But I sometimes went into those fights.”