Věra Dvořáková

“At the time of the trial of Milada Horáková, he was working in Odeon. All of the employees were gathered at the courtyard and had to hold one hand up high in support of Milada Horáková’s execution. They were under a lot of stress. All of them were under surveillance and therefore lifted their hands. My father was there with a colleague and when they got to the yard they spat in each other’s faces to somehow come to terms with being counted among the people who raised their hand for Milada Horáková’s death.”

“My mum wanted to sign Charter 77. At that time she was friends with the historian Karel Bartošek and they were a bit secretive about it even though she used to go to the same pub, to Medvídeks’. There was a bit of elitism in it which I don’t like to admit because I respect the Charters’ authors. My mum would say: ‘Karel, come on, I want to sign it, bring me the text.’ They never did. Although she was interrogated in Bartolomějská street and despite me transcribing various materials on the typewriter, it was not easy to get to signing the Charter. My mum really wanted to but she was not allowed to.”

“Either on Saturday 18 November or on Sunday 19 November my dad was leaving for a meeting at the ‘Circle of Independent Intelligentsia’. At that moment when he closed the apartment door I managed to catch the Free Europe broadcast. On the radio they warned all members of the Circle since the meeting point was revealed and that the police was awaiting the participants. I remember starting to panic – my dad was over sixty years old and I got really scared that he would get locked up or beaten. The image of someone touching my dad – an Auschwitz survivor – was horrible. I could not but wait. And he wasn’t coming back for a long time. The participants really were arrested but then they released them. My father spent a night at the police, returned home in the morning, laughed and said: ‘I will probably become famous because the last who get locked up when regimes are falling, will enter history textbooks.’”