Tatjana Dohnalová

“Well, I enjoyed it very much. I guess I belonged among the slightly unusual children but I really liked going to school. And since I had good marks, namely in Czech and then in other languages, I was really happy. I didn’t even mind the drill since, as I say, I had good marks at school and found it really easy. I didn’t mind the environment. That we recited poems about Stalin and similar things, well I knew about this from my parents already. And my grandma was wise enough not to interfere. She let my parents to raise me the way they liked. She kept going to the church and I accompanied her. I had no problem to combine these two things. I even applied for religious education in the fourth year. It was still possible then. My grandma signed my application, the parents didn’t have to know. When they learned later, they were angry. And I still couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get educated and yet visit religion class.”

“We already had Kateřina. In kindergarten they were told bullshit so we tried to steer her in another direction. Fortunately we had a recorder and many recordings from the 1960s, as my husband recorded both music and literary shows. We left out TV completely, radio as well and we lived by listening to our tape recorder. We listened to Kryl and singers we had on recordings. And then we actually started meeting people around the dissent, albeit warily at first, including Pavel Rychetský. But after Charter it gathered momentum. We were happy to be surrounded by people who thought in the same way as we did.”

“It was still compulsory to take part at the general election so you needed some courage not to go there. Now it looks terribly simple but back then it seemed impossible to us. Even if we considered it. I don’t know really, I would say one had to grew up to it, because then you learned about all that dirt. There was the trial with the Plastic People of the Universe. And it was too much. Because the Voice of America — we couldn’t listen to Free Europe but could listen to Voice of America, so we listened to Voice of America and learned everything from there. It sort of grew in us, we felt it was too much. When Charter appeared, followed by the hysterical reaction against it — “traitors and renegades” — this was the moment. I knew one of the renegades, Pavel Rychetský, in person. So it made me very angry, and my husband was angry too. Then we took part in full.”

“I was allowed to visit him (brother – ed.’s note) every year. In 1985 I was bringing some things for him from the Jazz Section and I had a terribly unpleasant incident at the border because of that, probably because somebody had informed them. I was terrified, because I just happened to have books in the process of transcribing at home. Afterwards I phoned my family from Vienna, using various code words in order to tell them what they ought to do, but they did not understand anything, anyway. On the way to Vienna, they had led me out of the train and they confiscated everything that I carried, including my purse, unexposed film rolls, and dictionaries for my brother. I wanted them to give me a report, but they did not give it to me. They told me that they had already delayed the train at the border for forty-five minutes because of me, and that if I wanted to go, I should get on and go. I thus got on the train and went, because I was afraid – my brother was supposed to be waiting for me at the train station in Vienna, and if I had not arrived, he would have called to Prague, and there would be trouble.”

“We had an old television set, and it stopped working. My husband got an idea that we would throw away the screen and the internal parts and a friend of ours then made a kind of a grey plate which looked like a TV screen. If the StB came, they would not know at the first sight that the TV did not have a screen. It had an electric cord, too, which was inserted into a socket. It had a removable lid and every evening I would hide the book in progress with everything else inside that TV set. This was our hiding place.”

“Jirka Gruntorád then started giving me books, for example books by Egon Bondy, Bohumil Hrabal, the book Tank Battalion, which somebody from the samizdat lent to us and I thought – I have to transcribe it, we need to have it. This way it gradually developed. Or Pavel Rychetský would borrow some book from Škvorecký’s publishing house and I would sit down and transcribe it. I have copied around sixty books in eleven years.”