Pavel Horák

“After several months of investigation, I was taken to Teplice for trial and the lawyer Beneš, who was appointed to me, he did not do anything for me, my mother gave him all the gold she had and a wedding ring. Such bent kind of people, I kept meeting them all my life. He did not help me in any way, the judge gave me fourteen months of hard core jail. So I went back to Litoměřice, those terrible days again, mother did not know, where I was when I was taken. They didn't tell her anything. For a few days she was worried about what was wrong with me. And in Litoměřice I was waiting for the Court of Appeal hoping that somebody might have reason. And after a few months' trial in the regional court, I was escorted there. For the second time, they gave me a ´bear´ as the greatest criminal! 'Bear,' that's a belt, and you're strapped like that to your body. So I went through that court and there Judge [Vaclav] Nygrin - he was the killer of all these political ones. Today he works as a lawyer. He sentenced me to four more months, so I got a year and a half to serve in prison. He justified this with hostility and hatred for a socialist system, and that the Western media used this case to unleash a campaign and so on. But if you could see those looks! There was absolutely no chance. The defense attorney freaked out, he would not go against them because he's also a communist. The whole Senate were communists. And you would stand against them there, and no matter what you say, they just would not listen to you.”

“Then came eighty-six when Jaroslav Seifert died, and again… He was a national artist, a signatory of Charter 77. I was stuck to Free Europe, so what could follow? Leaflets regarding funeral - death of Jaroslav Seifert. There was a part of his poem up there, there was some talk that a Czech poet had died, and when and where he had a funeral, in Markéta and then in Roudnice, or actually in Kralupy nad Vltavou. It was a terrible affair at the time, and I distributed those leaflets all over Teplice. But I've always been alone in everything, I've never had anyone to confine what I did. It was such an initiative on my own, when I say it, I was pissed off about how they treated him. The town of Teplice was full of secret policemen, and it took them fourteen days to get me. And they actually got me because I had some papers that were dirty from that copying machine, and I burned them in the garbage. A friend came up and asked: 'What are you burning?' I had a trabant car at the time, so I said: 'My brakes have been frozen, so I have to warm them up.' But the neighbor - they walked everywhere, all over Teplice, there were tens and tens of stubs, reinforcements from Prague - so my neighbor finally told on me that I was burning some papers in the garbage. And coincidentally, the garbage man just didn't come and the police found there pieces of charred text, paper, in that trash bin, at the very bottom.”