Dionýz Hochel

“Yes, it was already during my university studies. And I remember also the last years of the grammar school, when Brezhnev died, and Andropov came to power. He died as well, and then Chernenko came to power. He died as well. Then Gorbachev came to power, and I found myself in a unique cluster of friends who had the opportunity to get dissident literature, so we had already read and distributed it among ourselves. I can mention Daniel Bútora, who gained access to forbidden dissident literature through his father, Martin Bútora, and so we got, for instance, the Dictionary of Forbidden Czechoslovak Writers, Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Orwell’s 1984. We received journals and other publications, for example, Pavel Tigrid’s Testimony from Paris, and publications of the Index publishing house in Cologne, and we had the opportunity to read works and materials by dissidents from Czechoslovakia, and even Bratislava, for instance, the magazine Fragment, Dominik Tatarka’s works (short stories and essays), and essays by Milan Šimečka and Martin Šimečka (his son). So it was an absolutely unique group. We found ourselves in the position of having all the information at first hand. Thanks to these materials, thanks to Havel’s essays, we had the opportunity to have first-class contact with the contemporary world of Czechoslovak dissidents. That helped us a lot to be ready in 1989, so we could be in the first line of the student protest movement that arose immediately after 16 and 17 November.”

“Well, on 17th November, of course, the events are known, the march at Národní třída in Prague was supressed, and the rumour about the death of the student Šmíd and the Prague university students entering the strike started to spread. We received that information already on Friday through the Voice of America, the BBC, and Radio Free Europe. We called each other during the weekend and discussed what we were going to do. I remember that Milan Novotný called me on Saturday and suggested a meeting at the Crimea café on Monday morning at seven, where we would write down requests and make them public on the same day at Comenius University. And so it happened. Six or seven of us met at seven in the morning on 20 November 1989 in the Crimea café. In the meantime, the students at the dormitory wrote down the requests, so we actually just added some comments and came to the space in front of the hall at the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University around eight or nine in the morning. We stood on the windowsills, and each of us read one sentence of those requests so that the responsibility would be spread evenly among us. If they were to expel us, there would be more of us, at least. Students were coming in; they were responding and discussing actively, they agreed with what we said and stayed with us. The dean of the Faculty was passing by and asked us what we were doing and told us to go straight into the hall. He opened the hall, and there on that day the first university students’ strike committee in Slovakia was established. The Academy of Performing Arts joined us later, but separately, with their own strike. But in fact, it was in the hall on Monday 20 November that the strike of the Comenius University students was announced. At the same time, the Public Against Violence movement was established in the Slovak Art Forum building, and all those movements gradually merged. Student activists were among the activists of Public Against Violence. And also, the other way round, the requests of Public Against Violence were formulated in the lecture rooms of the Faculty of Arts. All of that, and I want to emphasize this fact, did not happen out of the blue. Everything has its history connected to that activism, to the possibility of acquiring dissident literature, being members of the anti-communist movement, and even the possibility of taking part in the secret church and lay apostolate activities. Another important point is that we had collectively gained the courage and overcame fear to stand up, start the strike, and protest against the regime.”