Jarmila Štogrová

"It was difficult, for example, because in 1980 I was pregnant with our Jakub, and spent the whole afternoon until night at an interrogation... it wasn’t pleasant. It wasn’t pleasant, but it wasn’t such that someone physically hurt me, that’s how I would put it. It was, of course, mentally exhausting. I never actually gathered the courage to do what Jiří Gruntorád did—remain silent. I felt like I could say something, that I knew what I could say—I had it written in that manual, you know. But I don’t know, I probably wouldn’t have been able to hold out. And when I talked about it with friends, they also said that it’s really hard not to say anything. You always think that you can say something. For example, with Pavel Myslín, we mutually agreed that if someone asked us and we couldn’t remain silent, we would point to each other and say we went to the Němec family’s place. Because they knew, they photographed us, and checked us, and we couldn’t avoid that."

"[...] because an intellectual group that wrote samizdat had already begun to form there [at Brdy], not only the then magazine Dým (Smoke), which was produced by Houla - Standa Zárybnický from Zdice, but also collections of poems were left there. I think that the State Security became very unhappy with this growing undergrowth. Because the scouting or tramp romance of the 1930s was still fading, but just because the scouts and woodcrafters were getting into it, the environment started to change. And then in 1978 or 1979, when there were also sanctions against the tramps - they were pulled off the train, they were waiting for them on the train, there were all kinds of persecutions, perlustrations, unpacking of backpacks, dispersing potlachs and so on - I wrote a kind of samizdat handbook then, I called it Tramps and the Laws. There were three parts to it, and it was based on the Forest Act, but it was also based on the Helsinki Peace Treaty of 1975 - that is, on human rights, then on how one should behave in interrogation, what one must say, what one must not say, and so on. So I put a lot of these legal things together."