Rudolf Hůlka

"So I borrowed another loan and then came the terrible crash, which I didn't really cause and which was completely forgotten in Liberec. I bought the stock; it was in January and I spent this money on stock in the warehouses, the most marketable, stuff, so that we would have enough. From one day to the next, trucks with trailers started coming to the square, they put up site cubicles, brought in tall corrugated sheets and fenced the whole square leaving about two metres of space near me, an alley, leaving a two-metre alley in a triangle and taking the rest, building a two-metre fence of corrugated iron. There were pipes, concrete, almost a small concrete plant, and mainly cubicles, the site facilities. Nobody had said a word to me. Obviously, you don't buy furniture with your handbag in your hand."

"Once I inadvertently tuned in to the Liberec cops. They used short-wave radios. That's why VHF radios weren't allowed in the Comecon - the police radios used VHF. I tuned in to the police radio one Friday night. I listened to it regularly and found out there were so many of these conspiration flats in Liberec alone. Every night, policemen were standing by the windows in the corner houses, and as people would go out in the evening in the city, to pubs and just to have fun, the policemen tracked them using shortwave radios and I knew exactly which way they were going. I would be there modelling and listening to VHF: 'They'll be there in a minute. There's five of them and they're going diagonally, over.' 'Yeah, I can see them now, they're here at City Hall.'"