Beatrice Landovská

- "How did you earn a living?" (laughter) - "What's that? I'd be interested in that too. The fact is that such things as whether to have one or two children and whether it would be possible to support them, nobody was concerned with that. The children would always get fed, whether you had three or seven... They were sort of running around in these situations that we were always inducing, whether it was the different houses that we went to... Nowadays we call them cottages, but they were houses because there were so many people living there. Big flats or picnics. Just different events where these people gathered, concerts... So there were kids running around, dogs, and whether ten or twenty kids were running around, it didn't matter. Someone would cut bread for them, a loaf of bread cost four crowns. I don't know how we made a living. We had a two-are apartment [200 m²] and we paid a rent of 700 crowns after the increase. There were about seven of us living there, there was always someone at home. Cats, dogs... it was just different. We didn't have money. We had no money, yeah. We practically couldn't buy anything. Anything that went wrong, some machine that you couldn't live without, like a boiler, that was a problem, that was trouble. But again, we would somehow find somebody who could [fix it]. Two old boilers would get joined together. There were old heaters, boilers, and fridges everywhere in the pantries because they kept taking parts from them recycling them and bringing them back to life. If any capitalist saw that, he would faint because there was just no consumption. But it wasn't even possible to get the things. When they had new washing machines in the new shop on Wenceslas Square, people would sleep in their sleeping bags all night to get their turn. Nobody from our part of the society did that. So they just wouldn't have a washing machine, or ten people would go do their laundry to one person."

"Daddy's emigration was terrible, it was terrible. I felt like he was leaving forever, and I said goodbye to him as if it were forever. Then we said farewells to all those people, and there were several very significant departures for me. My father was the first one. He made his decision insanely fast because somebody ambushed him here, broke his leg, tried to kill him. Dad thought he knew who it was, that it was someone who had interrogated him. And whether it was a planned action or a private initiative of a guard... Two people simply ambushed him and started beating him up. At the National Theater, it sort of dispersed. They were then waiting for him... He went across the bridge alone. They ambushed him there, just fighting. But he was on his own, and they were two. They wanted to throw him in the water. He somehow got his foot caught in the railing, and his ankle broke. He was left hanging there, then they ran away. And when he realized that he couldn't walk, that it hurt, that his leg was broken, he realized that he was afraid to call an ambulance or the cops. He was afraid to call for help. So he crawled home, he lived at Újezd. He got home after 4:00 or so. And that was probably the turning point when he decided to leave. They pressured him to leave. But he didn't want to leave at all. He wasn't the kind of person who wanted to emigrate. He had friends here. He was dependent on the language. He had no particular talent for learning languages. I'm afraid I inherited that from him. He just didn't want to leave. He would have preferred to endure a lot of things here. But suddenly, he became terribly afraid for his life. He was also a terrible hypochondriac, and when he suddenly felt he couldn't even call for medical help..."

"So I didn't pass the talent test [to the conservatory], but not because anyone was trying to wrong me. But I did well in Math and Czech because I took tutoring in both subjects. It was very clear that I had to do well on those exams or I was completely fucked. So I went to tutoring. I wasn't that stupid to fail even after tutoring. So I got one B and one A from those exams. Even though I was always an average student and didn't particularly excel at anything. They would send those exams to the national board, from where they then forwarded them to high schools that those kids were interested in. My exams landed at the National Committee and they looked for a high school for me. But it turned out that there was no high school for me, that nobody would take me. My mother even found out that no high school principal in Prague was allowed to accept me. She went to the clerk who was in charge. Poor lady didn't get the notice, so she handed my mom the exams. She said, 'Take them, they're just lying around here...' She put them in her hand, and they discussed what I could do. It said machining mechanic, graphic designer... I wasn't very skilful manually. I had ambitions for the humanities, literature, theatre. So it was a pretty bad prospect. Anyway, when it turned out that the clerk had given my mom the exams, she lost the job the next day. And it turned out that they had faked my grades to two C's. And that the Ministry of Education - by order from above - corrected my school report card to five Cs, even though I didn't have any Cs, because I had really studied hard. That was something! So it blew up. The Voice of America reported about it that night. And that's how it started."

"I was attending that Vokovice school until I was ten. And during that time, my dad gradually became more famous. It was very gradual - how he started to become famous. It was more like there was this tension that we [Beatrice and her sister Andrea] didn't have, for example, school supplies and exercise equipment. And at the same time, father had one car, mother had another car... So there was this tension, and it got on the teachers' nerves. They knew it wasn't a problem for the parents, to provide for us. It just didn't even cross their minds. And when someone pointed it out to them, they didn't take it seriously at all. The kid goes to school, and the school takes care of him, so what do we care? We weren't even meeting the basic material requirements, and it was obvious that our parents were living a completely different, interesting life. They're having a good time, they're not getting up at 6:00 in the morning. And then it changed completely when I went to a new school. In 1971, my dad had a problem at the elections because he started swearing: 'Gustav Fučík, the pig', saying he ate the ballot papers, but that wasn't true. He just said he wasn't going to vote for that swine and went behind the curtain, which was a lot of nerve for socialism. So that was the beginning of his political downfall that happened in the autumn of 1971. And then we moved into a new apartment in January 1972, which he managed to buy in his glory days. When we got there, within three days, the bans commenced. We were in the position of being the famous children of a famous father in a new, then luxurious apartment, for about three days. We had a garden, a fireplace, a garage, parquet floors... it was amazing. We started school on Monday, and the teachers came to watch us as if we were at the zoo. They'd open the door, they'd look, and then they'd leave. It was a strange identity hit because we didn't know what to do when you're suddenly so attractive and you don't know what you've done to deserve it. But that only lasted a few days. Because on Wednesday, the song Zatracenej čáp (Damn Stork - transl.), which Dad had recorded just before Christmas with Marie Rottrová and was played all over the TV and radio all Christmas, got banned. It was banned on Wednesday. We started on Monday, and then it went one after the other. During January, he was gradually getting banned everywhere. Then he tried commuting to the countryside, but they started firing him from everywhere. When he had a small part somewhere, he would not get mentioned in the credits. By the summer of 1972, he was practically banned. So for six months, we had a very famous, but shortly after, banned dad, so it was difficult."

"So we went to Hrádeček, which is a small little castle close to the Václav Havel farm. So, I went with Gábina [Farová] to Hrádeček. Gábina had photographic ambitions, I think she brought a camera and took pictures. Then we went down beneath Hrádeček like this. And of course, the access roads to Hrádeček were surrounded by policemen who were guarding the place. Everyone who was arriving or leaving was legitimized. There were only two driveways to Hrádeček. You could get there either from below from Vlčice or from the top from Janské Lázně. And they saw us walking in the fields. And the Public Security patrol which was standing there at the crossroads followed us to the field. They drove across the field to us, and there we were, just the two of us, on a walk that I had provoked Gábina to go on with me. I was fifteen, she was fourteen. They asked us for our IDs. Gábina truthfully said she didn't have one yet. I said that I did have it, but that I didn't have it with me, that we had only gone for a walk two hundred metres from the cottage, but that I could go and bring it to them. And they told us to get in. We really didn't want to. They told us to get in right away. They just let us in. We went back to the other patrol, and they let us sit there, and they called on the phone and said they had 'two objects'. We said we were fourteen and fifteen, that we wanted to go back. That we told our parents that we were only leaving for a little while and soon they would start looking for us. They held us in the car for about an hour. They were calling somebody, 'Nebula 27, Nebula 27'. They were awful old buffers. Then we saw somebody creeping around and hiding so they wouldn't inspect him. He was pointing at us, saying he could see us. It seemed a little far-fetched to me. But then, a second car arrived and they moved us into tha second car and took us to Trutnov for questioning, which is about fifteen kilometres away, a big Stalinist building, the Trutnov police. There they separated us, put us each on one side of the corridor and made us wait again. And then they took each of us for questioning. We were questioned by two policemen, and that was already unpleasant: 'You've recently been admitted to school...' How could they know, at Trutnov police? 'And what were you doing there? How many people were there?' I chose a kind of a Švejk-like method. I knew I couldn't tell them anything, so I said I didn't know how many people were there. That I was eating soup and stuff like that. Gábina said something, and then she didn't want to sign it, so they slapped her, 14-year-old Gábina, without hesitation. We were there for about an hour. Then the interrogation was written down, so they had us sit again in the corridor and nothing happened. We said we needed to contact our parents. There [at Hrádeček] were about 150 people and a lot of kids, a big hippie gathering. It was beautiful. But they were going to start looking for us sooner or later. And because the cops were always sniffing around everywhere, they'd suspect that we've been caught and taken away. Suddenly, there's this crazy screaming. But absolutely horrible. Dad and Anita [Fárova] got in the car and came to get us. My dad was yelling at the cops and hitting the glass windows like crazy. He made a crazy mess, they were shaking. Because they were deployed on Havel, they knew what to do with Havel. But still, this was the first time they had done this, that they arrested children. So they really didn't know if they hadn't screwed up, so they were just completely dumbfounded. All the police in the corridor and the ones who were there to question us and who slapped Gábina - you could see they were all scared. And father was yelling at them so hard to not involve the kids, and bang! the glass shattered. He wasn't scared of it. That's when I thought, "Oh, see, I have a dad. And he's no fucker.'"

"I went to the ninth grade, and in January, the Charter started. They started the Charter, and within three months, there was a terrible frenzy. Like when they called the notice board makers at school, they would come to my classroom to get me so that my name wouldn't be announced in all the classes. They were absolutely afraid to say my last name. Every evening, the news about the apostates, sell-outs and traitors started with that, and it was in all the newspapers, in Rudé právo (Red Justice newspaper - transl.) In Dikobraz, there were horribly mocking, ugly pictures, similar to how the Jews were illustrated during the war. So they depicted Havel, Landovský and Patočka drawn with such ugly caricatured faces. And that was getting published every day, those were the newspaper front pages. And then I came to school. The teachers were as if chained to their chairs with terror. Of course, nobody knew that the fifties wouldn't repeat. That's what Marx said - that tragedy, whenever it repeats itself, has a farcical character. But nobody knew how far it would go. When Professor Patočka died after the interrogation, on 13 March, that is, two and a half months after the promulgation of the Charter, a professor, a seventy-year-old gentleman, well, I was afraid that my father would be killed. That was terrible."