"And then we went - I remember that - to the Old Town Square, and to our horror, the Russians, one evil Russian there, aimed a tank or cannon at the Old Town square Astronomical Clock, which made us very upset. We were talking to them a lot, so he explained to us that yes, precisely because it is valued, so he is aiming at it, so we know what they can do. But that naivety was just absolutely unbelievable when one considers it. Somewhere, I think it was in Ústí that somehow the communications tower was called, the radio was asked to stop broadcasting and they said they wouldn't stop, and someone was broadcasting it and the Soviet soldier told them: 'Well, we'll censor it in a different way... We'll blow it up.' And then it was so scary that they'd blow up our communications tower! Well, there really was general awareness that the word - it had tremendous power and that they would be scared of such news. It wouldn't occur to anyone today, such an idea. Let´s just blow it away. It was just the idea at the time that we were right and they had to back off. And that had a lot of people, in my opinion. It wasn't just me. Basically, it was the whole republic, the signs and so on. It just bothered us terribly. And the surprise and the disappointment that everyone in the Soviet Union signed it, except for Kriegl, who in the end was not even Czech. I'm quite impressed, even now."
"And I went to look in that room there and the tanks were approaching and shooting at our windows. So, I know… So, I remember - it's weird - not with horror. When I think of some things, my hands sweat, but not on this occasion. That bullets suddenly started flying into that room, that I threw myself on the ground there and then crawled in - that was against the study, by the way. Well, I was there with old Ruml, and we went to look at the roof, we knew that the Russians, the Soviet tanks, were coming. And I also remember how there was such a snake of the tanks along Vinohrady Street, and it was indefinite, the tanks. And Ruml and I were standing there, and I heard people yelling like that from below, and we were like: 'What are these people going to do? This is a crazy mess! ' Because the tanks were approaching and from the other hand the other tanks were also approaching too, from the Museum. Those people were basically gripped there. We knew they would be gripped. And they were yelling at us there, something I didn't understand. And Ruml said, 'They yell: Drop the star!' And I said, 'Well, we can't, it's going to fall on somebody!' Because it was crazy, the star was… I didn't even notice it, we were standing next to a huge red star. Well, first of all, we probably wouldn't be able to drop it, but I thought it might fall on someone. And Ruml replied, 'Well, man, if we drop it ...' or 'comrade', he kept saying comrade 'When we drop it, it breaks and those Soviet tanks, when they come, the Soviets will think that there is indeed a counter-revolution here. ' Well, this answer surprised me a lot then."
"There were not enough facilities here, no education. The people who had — Dr. Svitak, for example — they were only few who were able to reflect on the situation. And then the occupation came and I guessed it quite right that it would not work. I knew that on the radio ... the people I met, the older people - there was, for example Chalupa for Dramaturgy, who actually founded the radio - so they told you: 'Well, we survived the Nazis, so we'll do such neutral things again.´ And so they were like that, and they survived. Then the radio… Then I heard it on the radio - he even apologized for the broadcast, quite unbelievable. And so, I think, I guessed it quite well to leave at that time. Although at first it was very uncertain what would happen. I was, frankly, I was worried too. Indeed, in Hungary, they simply shot the people. It was very harsh. And I was pretty, I must say, afraid that, as my father used to say, it could be unhealthy. The Soviet Union took, I do not know how many of their former emigrants who lived here to the Soviet Union. After the forty-fifth year, to Siberia. It seemed weird to me; Canada seemed better. There they also have forests. Like this."
"So I called a few more people, namely Jarda Satoranský, we were rather good friends then, and he always remembers it when we meet. And I went to the department of political news. It was not far, I don't know if you know the Radio building, how you walk through those hallways. And I said: ' So, we can broadcast.' They fainted: 'That's terrific!' and back then, it worked the way that the broadcasting director was responsible for the broadcast. They said: 'Who is going to do that? There's no director.' Meantime, people materialised, they were hanging around the hallways, many people came to the Radio, especially those hardcore communists, they wept there. Viola Fischerová stood there too, one of the more known people. And there were the announcers. I don't know who of them said it but someone said: 'Well, but Petr is here, right? He can do that.' And I said: Well then, fine, but I am not employed here.' They said: 'So this is an extraordinary situation. Someone has to do it, right. So you go do it, then.'”
“Three soldiers came to the studio. Following the nice Czech habit, someone snitched on us so they knew where from we were broadcasting. They came and told us to get lost. With those submachine guns, harshly. I always dressed rather nicely, back then, ties were worn a lot, and I had a summer jacket, a really nice one. That's why I have it [the script for broadcast] because I have this habit, whenever I see something, I put it in my pocket. So I put it in my jacket and that's why I have it. The soldiers told us to go outside and lock the studio. Which was a major problem that could arise because we did not have any key. The studio had been abandoned for half a year or even longer, it was open, nobody repaired the lock, the keys were lost or something like that. The studio was open all the time. In the Radio, there was nothing to – erm, well, there was something to steal, magnetic tapes were quite expensive but people did not steal this way. It would all go smoothly but… I have to say that the soldiers were quite civil because they could shoot us on the spot in cold blood. They simply didn't believe that we had no key. That was the end. We kept explaining over and over that we simply don't have the key. At the end, they told s to get lost and one of the soldiers stayed at the door and kept guard.”
“By the way, [Václav] Havel was doing the entrance exams with us. He was not accepted either. It was quite interesting, during the entrance exams, the news spread, as I told you, that the things, after all, somehow… Havel's favourite theme, such an important theme, and now I am not talking about politics but about philosophical matters, he was very good in some. He was investigating the question of alienation, which – which is quite interesting – the Communists did not like but it's a Marxist term, a term used by young Marx – alienation. So he was interested in that. So, allegedly, Havel gave some sort of a long speech how, in the bourgeois society, alienation is building up. One of the professors, AD, he would always have such “funny” comments, he said: 'All right, Mr. Havel, but how can you, of all people, coming from a bourgeois family, say this?' And Havel told him: 'Exactly because of that. I know it from home.' He totally grounded him.”
Petr Feyfar was born on March 17, 1940 in Prague. His grandfather was Jaroslav Feyfar a doctor and photographer, his father was a well-known photographer Zdenko Feyfar, who worked as a professor at the State School of Graphics in Prague after the Second World War. He left there shortly after the communist coup in 1948 to protest against socialist realism. Thanks to him, the family came in touch with many artists, for example Max Švabinský, Josef Sudek, Jan Zrzavý. At the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, Petr Feyfar studied dramaturgy at DAMU in the same class as, for example, Petr Čepek, Marie Málková, Ladislav Mrkvička or Jiří Krampol, and began working in the foreign broadcasting of Czechoslovak Radio. He also wrote for Večerní Praha, worked as a lighting engineer at the Na zábradlí Theater or as an assistant director in the circus, and collaborated with Jan Grossman at the Kladno Theater. He recalls that on the night of August 20-21, 1968, he took part in a live broadcast in the Czechoslovak Radio building. Shortly after the August events, he emigrated to Vienna and from there to Switzerland, where he met, among others, the well-known playwrights Eugene Lonesco and Friedrich Dürrenmatt in the theaters. Dürrenmatt was assisted in directing the famous play Strindberg. In the 1970s, he studied philosophy, Slavic language studies and psychology at the University of Basel and then worked in Switzerland as a psychologist and psychotherapist. The memorial was being monitored in Switzerland by the Czechoslovak State Security and allegedly also by the Swiss secret service. Petr Feyfar died on September 9, 2022.
Students of the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Italy, on tour with the Karel Čapek's play The Life of Insects. From the left: Petr Feyfar, Josef Abrhám, Zdeněk Pošíval and Jan Schmidt. 1962
Students of the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Italy, on tour with the Karel Čapek's play The Life of Insects. From the left: Petr Feyfar, Josef Abrhám, Zdeněk Pošíval and Jan Schmidt. 1962
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