Peter Kalmus

“Suddenly in 1968, when you didn’t perfectly know Solzhenitsyn and his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, you had an F at school. However, a year later, if they found this book at your house, you got arrested for 5 years. That’s how it changed. We had literature and at the study room, my classmates tore out pages from the students’ books describing Mňačko, Solzhenitsyn, just because they didn’t manage to print out new books. I refused it.”

“The basis of underground was that the majority of people, about 95% had the essential self-preservation instinct to have children, family, and once having kids one never wanted to have them sick or in orphanage. That’s why people tried to collaborate with the regime. They went to manifestations on the 1st of May, attended meetings. One of the Screwball’s messages was that if you didn’t want any career, you didn’t mind working as boilerman, worker at a farm, or dustman, because you had nothing to lose. They had nowhere else to put you. However, people were afraid to lose comfortable career – of being a head of a hospital department, or a teacher. If you gave up your career when being young and childless, they had nothing to blackmail you for. Their philosophy was: If you don’t do what we want, your children won’t get to the pioneer camp, they won’t be accepted to grammar school… Now you got scared. For God’s sake, why would I have three kids if they were doomed to end up like dummies? This was the principle of the flock, of the mass.”