"We actually came to tell him [Ladislav Adamec] what happened there. That it was a student demonstration, very peaceful. That we as students called for dialogue and what came after that. Of course, we looked terrible. This friend of mine, Věra, had to walk down Mikulandská Street, or the passage that leads to Mikulandská Street, where the red berets were. So unfortunately she had bruises and bruises on her face, on her arms, everywhere. So we looked really bad. You could see it. We were really twenty at that time, young girls, quite petite. The personal experience is ultimately the strongest, it was in us from the night before. We told the story chronologically, and mainly we focused on the intervention, which was completely inadequate. And that the students wanted nothing more than to talk to someone, but that someone didn't come. And that it was completely peaceful - the flowers, the songs. And in response came this brutal massacre.
They both just remained stunnedly silent, [Ladislav Adamec] with that minister Prokopec. And it was obvious that Adamec was getting distorted information. He kept asking why the students wanted to go to Wenceslas Square. Why did we have to go on? We said that nobody wanted to go on. They all sat down there and just called for dialogue. And if the peaceful demonstration had dispersed, everyone would have left. But there was nowhere to go.
You could see that the police were giving him information that was a little bit different from what the reality was. He talked about rioters and so on. That's their vocabulary. And then we talked about what was going on in the state. He was telling us how hard it was in the Communist Party. Then we got on the subject of Václav Havel. I remember that very precisely, because he said, 'Václav Havel, he's a boy from a bourgeois family. When I was a kid, my family didn't even have enough money for shoes. I had to go to school barefoot. And this Havel was driven to school by a Mercedes driver. I would never shake his hand!' Of course, we all know the famous photographs of Ladislav Adamec and Václav Havel shaking hands from the demonstration on Letná Street, which followed about a week later, ten days after that. But I think that he really took it very ideologically."
"And then it loosened up a bit. And I was telling myself in such a panic that I didn't care what happened to me. Let them lock me up, let them lock me up for the rest of my life, as long as I didn't want to end up there suffocated. So I went up against those security regiments, those white helmets. I figured they could beat me up pretty bad, but they probably wouldn't kill me after all. So in a panic, in shock, I went against them. And it was very interesting that one policeman, the first one I encountered, the one with the baton in the white helmet, the two-meter tall guy with the shield, he let me go normally. Not once did he cut me with the baton. He let me go. And the guy behind him, he was already swinging. Somehow I got behind them and suddenly I was behind this cordon of white helmets. There was a completely open space in front of Tesco, it was the May department store then. There was nobody there. And wherever they went, there they went, two undercover cops appeared. They were wearing these absolutely hideous, grey-blue, grey-blue, shaggy long coats. That's exactly what I remember. Terribly ugly men. They pinned me up against the wall of the house, there was a language school there at the time, and one of them kept hitting my legs with a stick. The other one was yelling at me about who I was, what I was doing there, why I was there. Suddenly somebody in uniform came in, quite a tall guy, young, probably a commanding officer. They stopped immediately. At that moment you could see that he was high up, superior to them. He asked me, 'Why are you here? What are you doing here?' I was in tears, in pain like crazy. I remember I was sort of blubbering, 'I don't know, I don't know why I'm here.' I was crying, of course. And he said to me, 'Well, pick yourself up and go home.' And he left. And at that point, the two guys in the shorts coats did too, and they left, and I was left standing there by myself. In this empty space where nobody was."
"And at one point there really was such a panic that the people were so packed in that you couldn't breathe. The pressure was such that you couldn't breathe. I was thinking, I guess their strategy is going to be that we're going to get trampled here now and it's going to be all our fault that we trampled ourselves. And that's actually the punishment. We're not gonna get locked up, we're not gonna get beaten up, we're just gonna get trampled. So I remember that Věra and I tried to get to the edge of somewhere so that we could breathe properly. We got to the edge where there were cars parked in front of the Albatros store. That was the famous bookstore, Albatros. And there was this stall, I think, with flowers, and there were cars parked outside. We stood between the cars because there was space. You could breathe. But just until the pressure of the people was so strong that the cars started squeezing together. Věra's legs started getting crushed. So some guys pulled us up onto the cars. Which was weird, we can't climb on top of people's cars, right. Anyway, they pulled us up because the cars were bumper to bumper. But I guess it was not a good idea to sit on top of the car in all the commotion and look down on it. So we climbed down again from the back. We got back into the crowd. And I remember there was a lot of blood on the ground. A gentleman was saying to us, 'Girls, you have to keep your hands in front of your chest, crosswise, so you can breathe.' And all of a sudden there was somebody lying on the ground below us, on the roadway, on the asphalt. We tried to help him. But the pressure of the crowd is such that if you bend down, the crowd goes over you. So you realize the self-preservation instinct that you can't bend down, because if you help him up off the ground, or somehow they want to treat him, you're going to end up on that ground too. I thought later that maybe it was the student Martin Šmíd. It was terribly unpleasant. You could totally feel that you were missing a few centimetres, and you were already stepping on the body of another person who was lying on the ground. That was the worst moment of the whole situation, when I said to myself: We're not getting out of here, that's just obvious. I'm going to die here. I looked up at the houses above me. That was the only view you had, up like that. I was still thinking: I wouldn't have thought that here, which is where I go to school every day, because the journalism school was only a short walk from there, that this could happen."
"And then, around the twenty-eighth of October, news reached me through Tomáš Vorl that Václav Havel was in the Na Františku hospital. That he had gone there to hide from having to be picked up again as a precaution. And since he was probably not in good health... When I found out, I thought: hey, maybe it would be nice to go to the hospital and visit him. Of course, that meeting had a big impact on me at the time. I wanted to meet him again. My friend Věra Krincvajová, I remember that instead of giving a lecture at the TV department... I said: 'Come on, let's try it, he's at František. Let's go and meet him, let's try to arrange with him if he would give us an interview for the Akademické listy that we were preparing with Pavel Žáček at the faculty. So we went to the hospital on the blind. There were no visiting hours. We snuck past the doorman. I still remember the porter calling out to us to come back immediately. We ran up some stairs, locked ourselves in a closet somewhere. When we figured there was probably nobody there, nobody was chasing us, it would be okay, we came out of the closet. A patient was walking by. We said to ourselves that it probably wasn't a State Security officer, it was a patient. So we asked him: 'Hello, please, do you know where Václav Havel is lying here?' He said: 'Yeah, yeah, over there on five, or two, or eight... Around the corner.' I remember we knocked. And we were very surprised to see that there was a sick man lying there. It was a feeling of wondering if we'd overdone it, if we were really in the right place at the right time. He had someone else in the room, so he took us out right away. We sat there and talked for about an hour. And he said that this particular co-patient was not exactly a regular co-patient. And that he was being watched, even in the hospital. He promised us an interview. He said, 'Let's meet.' He drew us a map of how to get to Hrádeček, to come on Friday, 17 November. We agreed to go to Hrádeček. I know that afterwards he often remembered that meeting, that this had somehow influenced him. He didn't remember that we had met in June with a group in Paroplavba. But I know he remembered this. That the two young girls who came to see him at the hospital in František, that he would never forget it. We were young, a bit stupid, a bit cheeky, of course. But he promised us an interview."
Klára Jirovcová Pospíšilová was born on 7 August 1969 in Prague. She lived with her grandmother in Poříčí nad Sázavou until she was six years old, and she started school with her parents in Prague. She came from an ordinary family, her mother worked in a travel agency and her father in a production company of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. From the time she was growing up she was interested in communication and media, she wanted to become a journalist and write about culture, especially film. After graduating from high school in 1987, she enrolled at the Faculty of Journalism at Charles University, and later began studying at FAMU as part of her special studies. In 1989, she participated in the Palach Week demonstrations, signed the manifesto Several Sentences, and met Václav Havel through her friend, director Tomáš Vorl. At the end of October 1989, she visited him with her friend Věra Krincvajová at the Na Františku Hospital. On 17 November 1989, she took part in a student demonstration, marched to Národní třída at the head of a procession and became a victim of police violence. The next day, together with Věra Krincvajová, they visited the then Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec and described to him their experience of police brutality. With her classmates from the journalism faculty, she began publishing Studentské listy, where she worked until 1992. She also participated in the founding of the Syndicate of Journalists. In 1992, she was offered by the then Minister of Finance, later Prime Minister Václav Klaus, to become his spokesperson. She worked in his service until 1995, then spent the next three years at the Foreign Ministry as head of the office of First Deputy Minister Alexander Vondra and advisor to Josef Zieleniec. She was a shareholder in the PR agency Czech P.R., where she also worked in political marketing. Since 2017, she has been working as a communications manager at Philip Morris.
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