Jiří Fajmon

"25 March 1988, the first demonstration in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic after 1969, so to speak, for freedom of religion and church, religious freedom and so on. Čarnogurský, Miklosko, they were all there. I didn't know them yet, I wasn't there yet. I arrived there, clouds of people everywhere. I slept at some college kids' place, friends from the church. I saw the transporters coming from left to right. The college kids were told not to go there or they'd be kicked out of college. Almost all of them went anyway out of conviction. Also considering Gorbachev and so on. So they wanted to go there out of conviction. A lot of them went there. So we got to the first roadblock on Hviezdoslav Square. I got 400 meters in front of it. I was there, I was standing there, there were religious songs being sung. There were a lot of people there, policemen, undercover. Candles in hand, this over there. "Throw it out, put it here. Why are you doing this, give it to us, go away." When we went back, Sloboda Street, Kiev Cinema. Eight hundred meters from the square, I was standing in the passage, it was cold, it was in March. A policeman came up: 'What are you doing?' I said: 'I'm standing.' - 'What do you have a candle for?' - 'If the power goes out, to have some light.' So I thought I'd get a beating. 'Passport!' So I gave it to him. Bohemian! Now he's seen a Czech. Good, they called somewhere. They took about 20 of us. We stood in the corridor, about a hundred and fifty arrestees. They charged about twenty-six of them. Of those twenty-six, only one was convicted." - "Who was it?" - "That was me." 

"The 21st of August, that was [an important date] for me, I had to go there. I had booked my vacation a month in advance. Nobody knew where I wanted to go. I think it was even Friday. It worked out nicely. I was going to take the train to Prague in the morning when I woke up. At 7:30 in the morning, there was a knock on the door: 'Police, NSC (National Security Corps), open the door.' Of course I didn't open it. They wouldn't kick the door in. I said I was someone else." - "You had someone else there?" - "I had a friend there, for about two months, who was looking for an apartment. I said, I'm not the one you're looking for, I'm the other guy. And I just didn't open the door. If they wanted to, they would have pried them open. So I waited there, waited, waited until the train left. I jumped out the window, because I lived on the ground floor, and I got on another train. I even took a truck to Turnov. In the afternoon I arrived in Prague, and I stayed there until the evening. In the evening I took the night train home. There were maybe two of us [from Liberec], there were a lot of people there. It was on the lower Wenceslas Square, down on Můstek. There was a big group of us. There was a Hungarian from FIDES. He was reading in Hungarian, they were holding him on their shoulders. He was apologizing... There was already a round table in Hungary, or rather an agreement. There was a round table in Poland, back in March. Solidarity was official. That was all new. That August was a big date for me, that's why I went there. I had a long beard and long hair. Now all of a sudden a bunch of people: 'Let's sit down!' Everybody squat down. But I don't think it was as brutal as Palach's Week. It wasn't. There were policemen in the back, militiamen in front of us, older guys. Fifty-five years old, like me today. They were begging us: 'Guys, stand up, go, they'll come with clubs, they'll beat you up.' They sounded full of regret. You could feel sorry for them. We wanted our freedom. In the end, we listened to them. Slowly we got up and like a snake from left to right we..."

“When I was twelve, thirteen, a group of us youngsters for together - we were really young, I reckon. We were in eighth year, and so we did all kinds of things, like exploring old attics, but we pretty much constantly listened to the BBC and the Voice of America in the evening - such a pretty jingle, such pretty songs. In fact, I think that even today there’s an ideology in some countries, say, to the east of us, simply that there’s some kind of freedom there, but the ideology is strong, right, so you can say what you like but even so, right, I’d say for instance Borůvka, right, you can’t say that Putin is stupid, for instance. You can here, but not there, it’s still strong there. But you a kind of feeling of freedom. So we were young, and so we wanted to use our freedom of sorts, and the society that had given us just one option, mandated that we should be Pioneers - I must say I wasn’t, I was very naughty, I had twos [bad marks] in behaviour from the first year to the ninth. I had that every year. Except one, which was a miracle. But that really was some kind of divine miracle, because otherwise I always had twos in behaviour, so I kept acting up and thinking up all kinds of nonsense. Not just at school but after school as well. I never skipped school, no, I always went to school, I learnt stuff, but my friends and I, eighth, ninth year, they started leading us somewhere else - that we were preordained for the SYU. That was the Socialist Youth Union. And that was kind of unacceptable to us. Say, we wore our hair long. That wasn’t allowed. We wore a cross round our neck. Or my friend had one of those ‘nukies’ [the nuclear disarmament / peace symbol - trans.]. That was completely forbidden. A member of Public Security [the police - trans.] would rip that off, right, he might not give the youngster a wallop with his baton, but he’d give him a telling to, and the school would get a letter, right.”

“At the time I made trips to Poland - I was about seventeen, eighteen years old, and I carried books there; I just smuggled in books by train and then brought back some magazines that were banned here, or books as well, either Škvorecký’s Prezidentův vězeň [The President’s Prisoner], or something by Škutina. Those are books that are freely available today and hardly anyone reads them, but I was active like that, that’s how I helped out.”

“So around 17, 18 years old, it was borderline; we were on our way from a wine bar, and although there might have been some alcohol involved, it was around August, and what got us boiling was that it was the anniversary of the occupation [the 1968 Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia - trans.]. And not one of the hundred thousand inhabitants of the city, no one put out a candle, a flower, nothing. That would have been immediately punished. So actually I had an idea, one of the dumb, young, eighteen-year-old ones, that I wrote on the regional office of the NSC [National Security Corps, the police force - trans.], which is like the regional police authority now, I wrote a kind of ‘derogatory’ inscription: ‘Dubček didn’t call you here, so it’s time for you to disappear.’ Those were quotes from old newspapers, which were official back in 68. Yes, but in those days, in 83, 84 it was seditious. So it was clear that they looked for the perpetrator until they found him. They found him in my person. And so that was actually my introduction to the legal system, the prosecutor, the attorney, aged eighteen, trembling, but I had something in me that for four years already we’d been the kind of tough nuts who wouldn’t crap out just like that. So I didn’t. It was just before military service, so they gave me a suspended sentence. One of them wanted a harsher punishment, the other said: a young boy, a young man, so they wanted to give me a chance. They gave me a suspended sentence, sent me to military service, except you can’t keep it in in the army, either. When you long to do something, the desire will force you to do it.”