Andrej Lukáček

"I listened to Free Europe and learned that [Václav] Havel wrote the Charter in our country. When I heard it, I said, 'I would sign this!' I started to ask who could convey it to me because I didn't know Havel or anyone else. I had an evangelical pastor, he was a friend of mine who had taught me Hebrew before. I wanted to go through him, so I went to Prague. But he had divorced in the meantime, his wife was also a parish priest, and she lived in a parsonage near Prague. They had one daughter together and adopted another. I came to them because I knew them from Heřmanův Městec when they worked near there. I went to see her, and she told me that she had no contact with him but that her daughter was going to have her prom, and he was going to be there, and she would tell him. I was glad she brokered it, she wrote me a letter. I was happy to meet him, and he told me to contact Mrs. [Anna] Marvanová, who was a journalist, an old lady she was. Her daughter [Hana] Marvanová is a lawyer and perhaps still works in parliament today. I went to her, I applied there, and she interviewed me about who I was. I signed in January 1977, so I was among the first. Not in the first document, but by the second or third, I was already among the signatories to the Charter."

"It was on the same day that the police came to Soukup [underground singer-songwriter Karel "Charlie" Soukup] and me. They searched him and me. All in all, they didn't find anything on me, maybe some material that I had published somewhere. I didn't publish much, but they might have found something. It was just pressure, I was never beaten, but it was pressure. In the end, what they took from me, they didn't give me back. I don't even know exactly what they took. There was a list written down. But then again, I was a bit superficial about material things. I came into the world with a naked bum, and I'm going to leave the world with a naked bum. Everything a person has here, either helps or hurts me. But I indeed had a nervous breakdown at the time. I was in Náchod, and it caught me there. I went to the chief at the station and told him I needed to call an ambulance, that I had collapsed, that I had a search warrant."