Juraj Mesík

“The interrogation went in a standard way many people experienced. There was good and bad interrogator. The bad one explained to me what a terrible subversive activity we were doing, what threat it poses to our Socialist homeland and I threatened with imprisonment. The good guy said: 'But we know that you are a talented student, you have excellent results at the medical school, you are interested in science. You could go to work in laboratories in Western Europe or America after graduation. If you want to save yourself from imprisonment, you have to work with us. Sign cooperation. And the good one said: 'If you want to have the opportunity to study and work abroad, you need to sign cooperation ‘I knew that I must not take on those offers or threats and I must refuse them. So I refused. Of course, they were not enthusiastic about it. The evil angrily went away, of course, they played the roles, he left almost slamming the door, pretending I would be sent to prison tomorrow. And the good one gave me instructions: ‘Think about it,' of course they were not using formal pronouns with me. He gave me a deadline within two weeks: 'When you come here, you just have to come down to the porter's lodge,' the man's name was Hnilička, I remember that name to this day, ‘ask to call Comrade Lieutenant Hnilička . I’ll go downstairs, we’ll sign it, and it's okay. 'And I didn't come and expected the negative consequences.”

“At that time I was already a university student, we founded an organisation within the structure of the Slovak Union of Nature and Landscape Protectors, which was an official organisation. We founded a basic organisation called Ekotrend. At Ekotrend, we started to do two things that caught the attention of the State Security: one was communication with conservationists, boys and girls of our age who were ecologically involved in the West, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. The second thing was that we started to make such exhibitions on environmental problems in Slovakia. They were entirely amateur. It was a time when there were no copiers. When we wanted to use an image at the exhibition, we redraw it manually. Such pictures were, for example, the cartoon jokes of some authors who commented on the ecological situation. Czech authors such as Jiránek and Renčín had very funny cartoons that talked laconically about environmental problems but in a hidden way. We combined these cartoons with newspaper clippings that talked about environmental problems. The propaganda was not totally bulletproof, occasionally there were relevant information about the problems, and those journalists who wanted it and risked it, who were lucky or inadvertently smuggled it into the press. We searched for this information, cut it out of the paper, and combined these reports with those jokes. With such exhibitions, we went to high schools. It was pinned to the strings, absolute amateurism. Since we were the official organisation of the Union of Nature Conservation with a stamp, the headmasters of schools allowed us to exhibit at several schools in Banská Bystrica. But somebody reported our subversive activities to StB.”