"I was standing there in the arcade and I was like, 'Come on, show yourself!' I'm telling you, I'd lost any instinct for self-preservation apparently. Luckily, nobody handed him the baton. Or unfortunately? I don't know. He turned around and gave me a couple of slaps first, real workmanlike slaps, and my head turned, but I just stood there, clenched, just getting more and more angry, and I thought, 'Well, show yourself!' Then he grabbed me. I had my hair around my head and he grabbed me by my hair and started slamming my head against the wall, and there was a column behind me. After like the fourth blow, I realised he might kill me. At the same time, I was already in shock and I dropped to the ground. I didn't fall unconscious, I just flapped around, lying there, knowing what was happening. I guess he thought it was stupid for me to be lying there, so he started kicking me, 'Get up!' - something like that. I couldn't; you're just in shock. While this was going on, other people backed away from the candles into the arcade, probably because they had behind them what I didn't have behind me at that moment. Or they just had their wits about them. It was only then that some people likely moved, and he turned around, ran into the bus apparently, and the bus left. Then somebody immediately called an ambulance that was still around. They picked me up, I was shaking, and they put me in the ambulance."
"Then a bus full of policemen arrived. It stopped by the candles that people were picking up, putting on the curb and lighting again as a kind of repeated protest. It's where the 'hands' are now, that's where it happened. That's where the people were being beaten as they walked through the police corridor. There, at the edge of the arcade by the sidewalk, is where I was standing - not alone - and now this bus came and stopped, and the person I got into a conflict with got off. He got off and started kicking the candles and throwing them off the curb. I was so tense, but again, I hadn't had the experience that the other people had and they might have been pretty shocked already, so I wasn't, I was just wound up. I walked up to him and I said, 'Do you mind the candles here?' And he turned to me, an older guy, a police officer. He was older; he wasn't from the riot squad, as it turned out later; he volunteered to stand in for someone. A man in his fifties. He turned to me, I was standing against the wall. Then he turned back to the bus and shouted, 'Hand me the baton!'"
"I don't know how to describe it. I tried to talk about it more than once when I was asked about it, but I never saw it printed - I harboured terrible rage! I'm a choleric person and it just grew inside me. I was like, 'No, I can't really do this anymore!!!' I was in a state of complete frenzy. It was so exalted. I was like, 'I just can't do this, and I don't care anymore, I'll sign the Charter, I'll find it somewhere, I don't care what I do to myself and my family. I don't care.' I was so excited."
Kateřina Vávrová, née Nová, was born in Prague on 20 December 1960. Her father Otakar, an architect, worked at the Academy of Sciences, and mother Drahomíra, an art historian, at the National Gallery. After graduating from the Na Zatlance Grammar School (1980), Kateřina Vávrová studied cultural theory at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University and then joined the Research Institute of Construction and Architecture where she worked in the field of sociology of housing. On 17 November 1989, she became a target of police violence in Národní třída, and after a brutal beating she ended up in hospital for several days with a brain haemorrhage. In March 1990, a trial took place, during which the perpetrator - a police lieutenant - was sent to prison for four and a half years. Kateřina Vávrová was living in Prague in 2024.
