Jan Král

“I thought that the regime would never change. I could not imagine it. I was really contemplating emigration frequently and for a long time. The State Security encouraged me to emigrate and my whole life would have been really changed by it. Emigration was thus present in my thoughts every day. That’s for sure. Thinking whether I should not just leave it all there and go away and start enjoying a normal life. But I could not imagine that the regime here would collapse. There were optimists, like Tomáš Hradílek, for instance, who was saying that it would collapse soon. They were the generation of 1968, but our generation has never experienced anything else but the normalization period. The change of Svoboda for Husák was the biggest political change in twenty years.”

“(What do you remember about 17th November?) I came home from a theatre in the evening and I turned on the Radio Free Europe and they were already reporting that members of the Youth Union who were organizing the march had been beaten, and so on. I thus went to sleep with a slight feeling of satisfaction that they were now not just beating only us as they had been doing all the time and that somebody else, too, would learn what kind of people they really were. I went to sleep feeling satisfied. I remember that. But the day after, on Saturday, Petr Šulák came to me and the rumour about Martin Šmíd spread. I knew one guy in Prague named Martin Šmíd. He was a member of some John Lennon club and I was thus sure that it had to be him. I got already a bit scared that they had killed a man whom I knew and who was now dead. Fortunately later it became apparent that it was not true… We agreed that on 20th November on Monday we would go to the People’s Militia Square. I put on my zigzag-patterned knitted cap and I wrapped a shawl around my neck and I looked as a member of the Islamic State, and I walked to the tram stop and I expected them to arrest me again. I rode the tram and nothing happened. Nobody dragged me anywhere as the StB men usually did. I thus got off at Smetana Square and I went to the place which used to be called the People’s Militia Square at that time. I still kept looking over my shoulder. People whom I did not know were already gathering there. We then walked to the theatre from there. The comrades were standing on the corner, I was watching them, the plain-clothed policemen, and I did not get involved at all. And they did not do anything. Then they came for me to the theatre on November 22, but I ran away from them.”

“I remember that in 1977 they talked to us about the Charter in school. Even before, we had already been forbidden to wear clothes with some written signs, especially English ones, to school. A lecture on Charter 77 was a part of our education. The comrade teacher said: ‘Children, when you walk home from school, you go through the Lenin Street, and there is a bookshop and the shop called Dílo there. An now imagine that there are people in our country who claim that they are not allowed to write books and paint some paintings. But you can see it for yourselves when you walk past that bookshop and you see that there are many books there. And there are paintings hanging in the Dílo shop. So what these people claim is not true at all.’ I still remember it, even today. At that time it was already obvious to me that they were lying to us. The lie was obvious. I would be able to reconstruct that lecture precisely. If I wrote a screenplay for some film from that period, I would include that scene in there without hesitation.”