Mgr. Ivo Chocholáč

"I got into the conflict because I organized a concert at the dormitory apparently for the first time. It was a concert of the music band Plyn, later it was called Dibuk, today it is called Zuby Nehty, they already are ladies. Such a punk group. I was making a culture programme at the university dormitory. Just before the end of the concert, two Volhas and arrived some civilian people jumped out of it, they took me to a room, asked me if I knew who they were, I told them I didn't. I did not know that it was StB, until later. They wrote something and said they will talk to me again, and that I should stop the concert immediately. And I didn't realize it at all, because I still thought it was some strange visit. I said insolently that actually the concert was over and they started threatening me and then an older man came to me and said if I knew who they were. He was the caretaker of the dormitory and he was shaking a little bit and said that it was the state security. So, for the first time, I actually understood how state security behaved."

"They caught me on the street, told me they would find me and then dragged me to a villa that was under the open-air cinema in Ústí nad Labem, it was the Passport and Visa Office, where I understood what was always said, there was the good one and the bad one. They had such a pressure talk with me there, the good one was good to me, the bad one was yelling at me. I'm not going to describe it, it doesn't matter. And basically, they had this conversation with me for about three hours in the living room, that was there. There I understood that it was a normal interrogation, that it was about names and they started threatening me that they would come to visit me to my parents in Liberec and that I like skiing, so that maybe he would come to me as a friend and that we can go skiing to the Jizera Mountains, so it was very interesting regarding the psyche."

“For me, it all started because I liked art. I liked reading, I liked a certain kind of music and besides that we were people and so were banding together. And then it led me, of course, gradually to samizdat and to the things like that. So, through my friends I got samizdat like Vokno and some hermetic things from D. Ž. Bora, I was interested in Hermeticism. That was how I got to it indirectly. I liked the poet Seifert, so I went to his funeral. And that was also wrong, when we arrived there in Markéta. So, it gradually formed the opposition from me. Because the things I was interested in, they were wrong. So, I found myself in the opposition basically like that, or among people who were somehow dissatisfied with the system. Gradually, I got Patočka's writings, and I got more writings. I read and devoured it, I saw that it was the right freedom. And they gradually placed me there."