Vojtěch Stříteský

"On Saturday, November 18, around five o'clock, we were already at the buses, because that day the Film Club organized a trip to Prague to show banned films that we couldn't afford to bring to Litomyšl, because they would probably really shut us down. We occasionally screened a banned film, but somehow managed to cover it up. We had friends at the Hungarian Cultural Center who had some archival films about what the Communists were really like. We went to Prague and we already knew that something was happening, because a short article appeared in the morning's People's Democracy that students were beaten on the National Avenue and that Public Security had intervened with immense brutality. We came to Prague and it was a different city. Overnight, Prague changed and we were suddenly confronted with the participants of that demonstration. Specifically, a person from the Hungarian Cultural Center, Dr. Jenö Gál, who was a great friend of mine, he spoke Hungarian just like Czech, and vice versa; he showed us his back. We were sitting in the pub, he took off his coat and his back looked like a black pudding sausage as they were beating them all by the truncheons. He said he had never seen it before, that they were kicking lying girls in the head, dragging them by the hair on the ground. The operation was brutal, he was shaken by it. We told each other all this and the whole of Prague was already a little upside down. At that time, I stayed in Prague for another day, until Sunday. I was there with my wife and we had arranged with a friend from the war that we would sleep at his place and go to the cinema and the museum. In the end, we only went to the cinema, because otherwise we walked from the National Avenue in direction to the Wenceslas square and there were already thousands of people everywhere, everyone was exchanging information with everyone, and suddenly it was clear that it had started."

"In Litomyšl and in this region, in Litomyšl, it was quite common for people to go to church. There were more families like ours and they couldn't get along with us quite like they imagined. Rather, it had stupid consequences, for example, a sister who was clearly a teacher type could not go to study pedagogics, because it was forbidden. The class teacher said to my mother at the parents' association: 'I can't for the life of me sign her application for secondary school for teaching, it's impossible. You attend church regularly, and so do your children, and that is an excluded thing.' And when the brother was stationed in the army, he was given the worst possible training, because in his papers, in the report, it was written that he was a religious fanatic. It was absurd and senseless, because we were a family like any other and religious fanaticism was out of the question. In short and well, those in power, the communists and their structures, were able to find deep places where it hurts you as an individual, as a family, what others are allowed to do, and what you are not allowed to do."