Jiří Devát

"For me, the most powerful moment of the visit of Tomáš Bat'a and his wife Sonja to Zlín was his appearance at the town hall, the appearance at the balcony of the Zlín town hall. It was the same square where all the previous demonstrations had been taking place, only the scene had actually been turned around. While our podium, from which we spoke to the citizens during the strike days, was on the other side of the square and was in opposition to the town hall, suddenly the scene turned around and members of the Civic Forum, together with Tomáš Baťa and his wife Sonja, were standing on the balcony of the town hall. And the same people who until then had turned their backs on the town hall suddenly turned round to face it. So it was just the scene. The square was just as full as during the general strike, people [were] really excited to see the descendant of the Baťa family. Mr. Baťa was speaking in typical Baťa spirit: 'We have a lot of work ahead of us, but we are looking forward to it. We are greeting you and we want to come back here to the country we grew up in.' But more than what Mr. Baťa said, what was important to me was the atmosphere of the crowd, of the public below us in the square. Because, in my opinion, this was the moment when Zlín, in a way, emancipated itself or, in a way got rid of the yoke of the past forty years, when it had been humiliated, had been called Gottwald, had been blamed for its previous success. It seemed to me as if the citizens of Zlín and its surroundings suddenly tore out all those pages from the Zlín chronicles between the years 1948 and 1989 and took up where the Baťas left off. It was as if those forty years simply had not existed."

"I remember more how we were disrupting that ideology at the grammar school. It was little things that we didn't even realise - that we were being naughty - but we were just making it harder for the regime to impose it on us. For example, we had a cultural performance at school, and it occurred to us - and I, as a theatre person, proudly took over the direction - that we would stage Little Red Riding Hood, but in English. And in such a strange way that the wolf was moving around the forest on roller skates, Little Red Riding Hood was Siamese twins, the grandmother was about two and a half meters tall due to the fact that it was two boys on top of each other. So it was a kind of provocation and they didn't know how to deal with it properly. The teachers who were in charge of civics and the chairwoman of the basic organization of the Communist Party, teacher Novotná, they didn't know how to understand it. Why the Red Riding Hood, who is red, is Siamese twins, what is the hidden meaning in it and so on."