Ing. Milan Kolář

“It was a friend of my dad with whom he worked and he was actually the first to come with the fact that it happened. There were more torches, as we call them today. But when I saw his sacrifice and the building of the District Committee of the Communist Party of the Czech Republic in Jihlava, that building full of comrades, when I saw what a huge apparatus it was, I asked who could tear it down. Dad knew Evžen well, it's terrible that that person gave his life there and we lived with it and still would not do anything about it. I was committed to organizing Nohavica´s concerts or Jirka Černý's discos until I died. And I was glad to be able to do that. I created my own world, my own oasis where the world was perfectly fine. I had to learn to walk the paths, through the jungle, it was a bit of chaos, a bit of a jungle.”

"Of course, there were anti-state associations in Jihlava and they had nowhere else to meet but here in Beseda. So, they booked a lounge there, that they would come there and meet there, and the State Security officers found out immediately. So, they surrounded the Beseda, the participants, the anti-state elements as they were called at the time, they stood in the park and laughed because they couldn't do anything to them. Nothing happened, nobody was found. But the feeling that something was about to happen in that house, and I was the one who made it possible for them. That there was simply some anti-state element there and that I was the organizer of all this, that was not good."

"Now, I think that it is very important. The phone rang, the doctor from the hospital called me, a young guy. 'Can we meet at the bus station in 10 minutes?' I said yes. In 10 minutes, we met at the bus station and he told me: 'Watch yourself, they go after you. – Who goes after me? - I cannot tell you. - How do you know? – You learn many things in the hospital.' And he left and I haven't seen him since. To make matters worse, he called me to the club. I picked up the phone, the head of State Security. The top boss and he said: 'Can I talk to you?' I said: 'I'm going to Meziříčko now, I have family there and a bus leaves in 10 minutes. – I will come for you by car and take you to Meziříčko.' He stopped in front of my office, loaded me up and drove me to Meziříčko, 20 kilometers away, in his company car. And in that car, he told me, 'Watch yourself, they go after you.' He was the biggest boss and he told me to watch myself."

"In my opinion, it's still a lost year of life. Although it is a kind of life experience where a person cannot go anywhere, closed and abandoned. We weren't allowed anywhere. I boarded in Tachov, which was like close to the border. If you know what a “buzerák” is. It's just a huge concrete asphalt space, there are those blockhouses, everything is green, disgusting, and there are those brass hats who yell at you whenever they find a problem with everything. Of course, we were able to find that we were able to climb the fence and run away and cheat in those military IDs (one had to have a permission to leave the place). Like in the jungle, that's what I read there. I'm just quoting Divadlo na okraji. They said: 'We live like in a jungle, and whoever finds the paths there, can simply live there.'"

"I did Jaroslav Hutka's first concert in Jihlava in Dělňák, a legendary hall where Gustav Mahler performed and then, in my opinion, a legendary concert by Jarda Hutka, and maybe since then I have some files somewhere that State Security kept on me. But I wouldn't want to see those folders. I have it set up so that I have to deal with it myself and so do they, and I wouldn't want to see that my closest friends informed on me or something like that. State Security never harmed me, although from 1974 to 1989 they simply chased or harassed me. Or rather they tried to intimidate me.'