Peter Zajac

“I worked as a prose editor and I started to publish works of my contemporaries, what was great. It was really nice job and I enjoyed doing it. However, in 1971 the censorship of texts began, some of those texts had negative reviews, so they couldn’t be published anymore. In 1972 I was fired from that publishing house, because I was quite stubborn and I was an editor of the texts that became banished. They were printed out, but couldn’t be distributed. For example, there was a book of reports of Peter Repka named Vstaň a choď (Stand Up and Go), or Anton Baláž’s novel Bohovia ročných období (Gods of the Four Seasons), what was more of a Solzhenitsyn’s type of text, but many other things that I had reviewed, as well. I had there also some manuscripts, which were then published twenty years later, like works of Pavel Hrúz, Ivan Kadlečík.”

“It is very strange that today everyone imagines the VPN (Public Against Violence movement) as some kind of organization existing within the social system. People imagine, it had a structure with certain hierarchy and particular leadership, but nothing like that existed. Firstly, until December 1989, the Public Against Violence as well as the Civic Forum were still illegal. Only in the end of 1989 there was a law passed, allowing the existence of such type of the civic associations. And secondly, it was the time of horizontal structures. No hierarchal structures existed in VPN. There was no chairman, no vice chairman, no committee.”