Jan Kofroň

"Actually, I started going out with a girl while we were standing in the queue to honour Jan Palach, we were at the beginning of Pařížská Street. It was a line that went from Pařížská through the Old Town Square, down Celetná Street to the Ovocný trh (Fruit Market) and to Karolinum. That was a great event, I felt the funeral very strongly. It was supposed to ring [bells] at the funeral, by the way. And I had managed to get a key to St. Havel's Church and now there was a crowd of people and I was saying, 'Let me in,' and I was showing this huge key, 'I'm going to ring the bell!' And a man came up to me and said, 'Can you do that?' Very good question, I never had done it, of course. And it's not a huge bell, the St. Havel's bell, but it's not just like a pot. It did have a certain diameter. And so, thank goodness this man went with me, I think it was at two o'clock in the afternoon when the bell was to be rung."

"Of course there were people who still remembered the pedagogical school of the first republic. Some of them were perhaps more scared, I noticed that the maths teacher we had then in the sixth year purposely introduced some kind of singing group where we sang some stupid, excuse me, song about some Nakhimov's followers, they might have been some shock-workers [they were probably graduates of Nakhimov's Naval School, ed. ], and then there was also the teacher Mrs. Truhlářová, she was obviously inwardly suffering, she taught history and... she was there, trying to cope as much as she could. The headmaster, he was almost a villain, I remember that, I was working temporarily in the teachers' library and he was standing there, and next to him was the Czech teacher who was running or organizing the library, and he [the headmaster] threw out all [books by] Plato..."

„I hadn´t even known who was going to ordain me. I was told: ,Come to Bubeneč railway station that day, you will be taken.' I was escorted to a flat in Zelená Street. But I had already known the apartment! Because my father's friend, a First Republic officer, lived there. There were sabres hanging there. And two men came in whom I believed to be priests. It turned out that one of them was a bishop, and I was ordained. Well, and just then I was introduced to the community ."

„And we had the best teachers possible, because all of them were the people who were forbidden to work in public and who had come out of prison.” - „I guess that was dangerous...” -„ It was, of course. So we met in such a way that it rotated from one family to another. Each family had own number, because if perhaps something changed, that we were going to meet some other time, somewhere else, then you could phone. The phones were monitored, so you'd say on the phone: ‚Hey, Franta, write down an engine number, I forgot to tell you.' And there were three pairs of numbers, and after subtracting or adding thirty somewhere, then we knew when we were going to meet and what time we were going to meet. Yes, so it was a kind of rotation, we gathered in one place about once every three months."

"Every day at eight o'clock in the morning the newspapers were sold out. Because every day they published... they published the crimes which had happened in the concentration camps and prisons. And then the regime also loosened the grip in the sense that it was possible, under certain conditions, if you got an invitation from abroad, to go abroad. That was wonderful, [to go] behind the Iron Curtain, as they used to say. So my friends and I forged an invitation to Italy and they really bought it. We got a foreign typewriter, foreign paper, wrote it in Italian or something, an invitation to go somewhere, and we went to Italy. [We were] absolutely naive, because the commmunists exchanged us only the so-called hundred-dollar bill. We were allowed to have a hundred dollars exchanged by the bank. Well, I tell you, for a hundred dollars you could also sleep in a fancy hotel, one night, of course. So on the black market, because a lot of foreigners started to come here, and even if it was embarrassing, we started to address Germans, Italians: ‚Hello, please, we are students, we would like to..., can you exchange [money] for us?'. And then I remember that some of the Germans, they were setting high exchange rates, we had to buy it expensively as they needed to make money out of it. Well, and we got into Italy. That would be a curious story of how we lived there and how we slept in the countryside and the experiences we had. That was wonderful. Well, when we were in Ravenna, on the morning of August twenty-first, he came... the Salesians housed us there for free... and Donerico came and said: ‚Please, please, it seems you're being occupied.' After a while he brought a newspaper and there were the tanks and so on. So we went away, we wanted to go home. The border was closed. First we stayed in Venice for a while and there we took part in a big anti-Soviet demonstration."