Tomáš Ježek

“July 1990, when Havel made one rather, in a good sort of way, nasty remark. He said: ‘Economists, what’re you doing? Where’re you lazying about? Its half a year after the revolution and I can’t see a single private-owned pub in Prague. I’d love to visit one, but there isn’t any here, so when will it happen?’ So I thought that we’d have to come up with some method to make it faster, so we came up with the small privatisation, which with hindsight proved to be an excellent idea. It had great results. The privatisation concerned properties such as pubs, hotels, restaurants, workshops. The word ‘small’ is some kind of journalistic shorthand, or the public started calling it that. The defining trait lies elsewhere. Only tangible assets were sold, but the liabilities remained with the old company. So the company was taken apart bit by bit, it was sold off in those auctions, it retained its liabilities, and those were settled by the proceeds amassed on the ministry’s account.”

“His resistance consisted of the fact that [Vojtěch Ježek] sent some messages to London concerning the military production at the Škoda Works in Pilsen and some transports of military material for the Wehrmacht. Of course, they found him out soon enough and nabbed him. On 1 November 1943 he was arrested, and that was the last time we saw him. My physical memories of him are very limited because I was three and a half, but I do have some flashed of him. I remember one time, when we were in Zahrádka, which is a village near Nepomuk, where we spent the holidays. Dad had some pupils there who provided us with a summer flat. In the summer he took me on piggyback, on his back, his shoulders, and when dusk fell and it was dark, he took me out on to the meadow, Draha it was called there. We watched the floodlights above Pilsen. We could see the anti-air defence floodlights in the distance.”

“On the twenty-third of August I was with my brother Martin at the [National] Museum at the moment when they let fire on it, they thought that something was going on there, that it was some kind of HQ. You can still see the bullet holes there, and I was there when it happened. I was up the top, where the ramp is, there are three entrances to the Museum. Of course I was afraid because they were shooting over my head. Luckily, one of the glass panes in the entrance was knocked out clean, there weren’t any shard there, so I launched myself from where I was standing, jumped through the window and rolled over the marble floor. I made use of my physical prowess and thus got myself out of danger. In the evening I talked with my brother, he said that at that moment he was lying in the fountain a few metres away.”

“I myself participated in the samizdat, I published some things in samizdat. Those were people around Emanuel Mandler and Bohuš Doležal. We published these kind of books, and we earned the money for it in such a funny, almost touching way. We had a friend somewhere in Satalice, and he provided us with some land. We cultivated garlic on it. We sold that and used the proceeds to buy paper and things like that. I samizdat published my translations of Hayek, both The Road to Serfdom and his big book Law, Legislation and Liberty, that was all published in samizdat and distributed around Prague.”