Tomáš Mazal

"In hindsight it's funny like that, the whole thing is funny. Of course you know. They say to you, 'Hey, I've been interviewed, watch out, it was about the films,' so I thought, now it's my turn. One week nothing happened, the next week nothing happened. So you're still waiting for it to get there. And now the technology. You go to Bartolomějská street. I said: 'I'm called here at ten o'clock.' - 'Then sit here.' There was a glass booth opposite the doorman, so I sat there. There were some people sitting there waiting for something. And now this State Security officer came for you and called you Mr. Mazal. I thought: He calls me sir? Only later did I understand that the great ones, the real ones, were comrades and the ones who had already been written off those are sirs. We went upstairs and there was a big photo of Dzerzhinsky. It was the famous photo. There were Dzeržinský's everywhere in the offices, too..." - "They actually had that hanging up? I've come across that somewhere too, but I've never been there." - "Well, Dzeržinský. Hey, it was a bit of a comedy there, the two of them interrogating you. It was staged that way on purpose, everyone who went there probably experienced it. Just a desk with a glass top on it, and underneath it were pictures from the vacation. And now one good guy and one bad guy. And the one was looking at the pictures with interest - and here we were on holiday in Bulgaria. And then the bad one was there and he said, 'Enough already!' Then there was the one in charge, who was listening from the next room. There was an open cupboard. And he corrected it. He'd come in and say, 'No, not like that, like that, like that...!' He left again. That was comedy." - "And did you have any concerns about that? It's an awful long time ago, so you look back on it with such... they're funny stories, but they weren't so funny then." - "Well it was, just as you say. It wasn't about the movies. It was about who was going there, the people who were going there. A lot of times I didn't know the people either. Look, there's a screening there and there, there's a screening at the Wizard, there's a screening at the Totem Pole, so some people came. You were more worried about not knowing who was there, what was being said. I don't think the cops really cared about the movies. If there was smoking or if there were drugs being given."

"I remember the sixty-eighth. I was at a children's camp, because my parents were getting rid of me for the holidays, because they didn't have so much free time, so they always put me in a three-week camp from Tesla Hloubětín, which was in southern Bohemia, in Předbor, in an old mill, there were tents on the hill above it. Every morning there was a servant who had to do something in the kitchen, clean up, and most importantly, go with a cart to the crossroads to Choustník to get the milk that the dairymen had left there for the camp. On that day, August 21, my friend and I drove with the milk cans. When we arrived at the crossroads, a woman came running in, completely terrified. She said: 'The Russians are here, there will be a war, we will have to go into the woods, there will be partisans here.' Run! Run!' So we didn't know. The friend shit himself, we left the milk cans there and we rushed to the camp in Předboř. They were glad we came back because there were tanks driving around. When the camp was over, my parents came to meet me at the bus. Then we went through Karlín and there in the park were Russians. They seemed like exotics or animals, like a zoo. They were wearing khaki uniforms, sitting on a tank and eating something. The first visual experience I had was something like Škvorecký describes in The Cowards, when he saw the Russians entering the square in Náchod: the smell of the steppe. I was not aware of any political context. To me, at that moment, they seemed like when you go to the zoo and in the park, not on trees, but on benches, on boxes, on cars, these exotics were sitting there eating something."