Vlastimil Ježek

“Monday evening brought a bit of a catch, when most of us [left the building of the faculty and - trans.] went to Wenceslas Square. That was the famous trick of Dean Vaněk. A few people stayed there, and we later found them miserable and locked out of the faculty. The dean had told them that an occupation strike is dangerous and that they were economically responsible for the whole faculty, if anything would be lost, they would pay for it. He smoothtalked them, and so we spent the first night from 20 to 21 November on strike in about thirty to thirty-five people outside the faculty. It was very unpleasant, with a view of the armoured transports across the bridge. Luckily, the cleaning lady came at five a.m., we famously overcame her, she gave us the keys, and we didn’t let anyone push us out again after that. So that was the last trick of that Vaněk man. Before that - on Monday, when the meeting in the great hall came to an end - we had gone to visit Vaněk in the dean’s office to get the keys to the building. Docent Hroch was there, a listed State Security collaborator, and they were both in a proper fit: ‘And will there be a defenestration as well, eh?’ [several famous historical defenestrations took place in Prague - trans.] I replied: ‘Don’t joke about that, sir, don’t joke, we’re on the second floor.’”

“It was around my third year at grammar school. I had already started listening to foreign radio, and I heard from the broadcast that they’d arrested Dana Němcová. I remembered her as a kind, intelligent lady, who used to visit us at the summer camps and tell us interesting things and who hardly looked like an enemy of the state. I just couldn’t get it, and it even led me to make one desparate act, which was foiled by my class teacher, luckily. I wrote a funny letter, that I’m quitting the Union of Socialist Youth because I don’t understand how they could lock up such a lady. I delivered it proudly to the class chairman [of the USY - trans.], and he luckily handed my attempt at a protest to our class teacher, the chemist Krupka. Krupka then spent the next week explaining to me how awful it is to have to teach at grammar school as a scientist, just because he disagreed with the arrival of Soviet forces. That was awfully interesting. He didn’t tell me what to do, but his story led me to take the letter back at the end of the week. I’m actually glad it worked out like that, because if my classmate had sent it upwards, I think I wouldn’t have coped at my age of seventeen.”

“The word perestroika really was like a red rag. Starting from the second or perhaps the beginning of the third year, I tried to organise a noticeboard newspaper, which simply meant that I looked for interesting articles, which I cut out or copied and pinned to the noticeboard, and [the other side - trans.] took them off again. It was a kind of battle, especially with three teaching assistants, Rzounek’s flunkeys. The fastest and most frequent to go were texts in Russian regarding the perestroika, they really hated those the most. The way they explained it was that we really couldn’t compare it with our situation, that the Soviet Union had completely different, specific problems. We found that funny because ‘our paragon the Soviet Union’ and ‘with the Soviet Union for all eternity’ [classic Communist slogans - trans.] suddenly didn’t apply. The perestroika in the Soviet Union was something that we were certainly not supposed to repeat. They didn’t like it, they didn’t speak of it. They knew full well that it was the beginning of their end.”