Pavel Dudr

“Friends - mainly the Devátý brothers - when they found out [I was arrested], they went straight to my wife and asked if she had any documents, mainly documents. So she gave them the house inspection report. And what happened was that these friends of mine dared to... That is: back then it was already possible to phone abroad from some phone booths, if you had enough five-crown coins to slot into them. It was automatic, but it was also bugged. So it was only for those who dared to use it. And so it happened that I was in custody for about a week or two, people didn’t know what had happened, why they’d arrested me, where I was. And then in Voice of America they read out my house inspection report, which was pretty hefty. And then we saw, or at least I felt it, that suddenly the State Security officers, the guards, the interrogators, they showed us a lot of respect.”

“What couldn’t be got, people procured in any way possible. So people built themselves houses, cottages, they constructed caravans, trailers. You could do a lot of things yourself, so we reckoned we’d publish magazines and books. Because books weren’t available, and lots of writers were on the index [of prohibited authors], and their books weren’t even published, so they were copied out in various ways.”

“I personally wasn’t some kind of dissident who would declare his opinions somewhere, that’s what the Charter spokesmen were for, they made the announcements for the press, they said their opinions out loud and were sent to prison for any number of years because of it. But I never talked about my opinions except with friends, but that was always an closed group. It was so closed, that when someone else came, someone we didn’t know, everyone immediately watched their mouth.”

“I wasn’t some kind of dissident. I just reckoned... What they were trying to do here with the dissidents, that was a handful of people, was to isolate them from the rest. I reckoned that it’s bad, that it’s necessary to keep in touch both with dissidents and with people. So I was in touch with them, but I didn’t do anything publicly. I wasn’t even interested in that, because if you wanted to copy things, you couldn’t be well known because they snatched the well-known people up straight away. You couldn’t copy literature if you were well known.”