Prof. RnDr., DrSc František Janouch

"Two months after the congress, the chairman of the Swedish PEN club told me that Charter 77 would be receiving the Monismanien prize. I created a special bank account called Charter 77. Later, I renamed it to Foundation Charter 77. The money for the prize arrived there: 15 thousand Swedish crowns. That was big money at that time because one Swedish crown had the value of four or five Tuzex voucher and one Tuzex voucher was worth about five Czechoslovak crowns. When the money arrived, I began sending the spokespersons of Charter 77 small amounts of money - a thousand or fifteen hundred crowns - to see how it worked."

"There was the PEN International congress and its chairman asked me to obtain some message from Prague. I promised him to give it a try and called Václav Havel. We knew each other a bit - I knew who he was and he knew who I was. We met in Prague twice on some events. I told him I was with Pavel Tigrid and Gabriel Laub on a PEN International congress and asked him whether he'd like to address it. He told me to call him back the next day, which I did. I recorded a message from him that he read to me. We translated it with Pavel Tigrid into English and presented it at the congress. It made a big stir there."

"In Prague, physics was practically exterminated as several professors died in concentration camps during the war and so on. In Prague, there was no faculty of physics but only of mathematics and physics, which was dominated by mathematics. Physics was cornered there. Apart from physics, I was interested in the Soviet Union and so I decided to try and study there. I graduated from a Soviet high school in Prague - even though at that time, it was once again called the 'Russian grammar school'. After that, I found out some students were to be sent out to study in the Soviet Union."

"I was in Kremlin and saw all the Soviet cadres including Khruschev there, and interpreted for them. It was a sort of a political university. Then I saw the shaken structures across the Soviet Union. They didn't know what to think to do - how to act following Khruschev's 1956 speech. For me, it was a great experience even though I already knew many of those things from my Soviet friends. But now, I was able to see the impacts of Khruschev's speech first-hand in the individual republics."

"We tried to do the parallel culture, and to support the samizdat. There were tenths of books published by Havel, Uhde, Vaculík and another dozen of authors. Back then, samizdat production was done using a copy paper. One could write about ten copies at once using the thin paper. I came to realize that this was after all a dated technology and provided modern equipment to Czechoslovak writers. They were given computers and printers and were able to distribute prohibited texts in a more modern way. Before that, they had to re-write each ten copies."