Helena Medková

“The position of the informer on Czechoslovakia for Czechoslovakia was in fact against the statute of Voice of America. Nevertheless, Ivan succeeded in establishing this function. Voice of America was to disseminate information on America without any sabotage activities; that is why Ivan was under the control of specialists trained to listen to Voice of America in fifty languages that the channel broadcasted in. These people did not necessarily spoke the language but the supervised the speaker and they objected to Ivan that his tone is not right, that it is too excited, full of hate – wasn’t there a sabotage in it?”

“Culture clubs in the country used to invite artists, held concerts and smaller towns actually lived by these concerts. It was not only students who performed on the regional scenes but also professional artists and Ivan Medek used to accompany them as he knew them from the time immediately after the war when he worked with professor Václav Talich and the Czech Chamber Orchestra, and from later times when he himself organised concerts while it was still possible. Ivan Medek accompanied musicians as a chauffeur and, at the same time, he introduced the concerts by his words. I and my sister benefited from this as thanks to Ivan Medek we had a chance to go out. It was very useful from the artistic point of view and rather inspiring. Ivan Medek never talked about composers but about the current situation; for instance, he never talked about when Mozart was born and when he died but about the position of the artist in society. As I heard many times from Ivan Medek, in the Czech history, since the National Revival, art often supplied politics and that is why he in his speeches lifted art into a different role. This was raising an awareness.”

“The Fifties - I’m starting school. And a big change is taking place because I start to realise - and it’s very much emphasised at home - that the things we say at home are not said outside, and the things they say at school are not true. That means that a six-year-old child, actually much younger than that, is living in schizophrenia. There are two things, they are irreconcilable, and you have to watch out or someone will tell on you. I remember that a lot of things were said in whispers at home. That is, my parents spoke about something, but in a way so that the children wouldn’t hear it. But you can imagine that children listen hardest precisely when their parents whisper, right? So, for example, as a preschooler I thought that Moscow was a rude word because it was only ever whispered. I remember that they spoke of political trials. Those were the Fifties. I know that when I’d finished my first year at school, we went to visit an uncle in Moravia. My uncle was a farmer, but they’d just taken all his horses, his machines, everything he had, and the cooperative was chaired by his former stable hand. I remember the year 1953, Stalin died in the Soviet Union and Gottwald died here. And we had to recite poems about how sad we were and how much we missed both those comrades. The school took us regularly to the cinema, they showed us Soviet films about the war, so we saw more than enough combat engagements, bloody battles between the good Russians and the evil Germans on that black-and-white screen.”

“And then, one summer day, my parents were on holiday, my sister and I were home alone, we heard on the radio that the Russians had arrived, that they’d occupied us, that there were tanks in Prague, and I know that my first thought was: ‘So now it’s our turn. Everyone’s been through a war, now there’ll be war here.’ And suddenly, I knew what I should do, right that moment I grabbed a bag and went to buy some bread. Because your mind’s working, war is coming. And really, there was already a queue of people waiting to buy bread. My parents rushed home from their holiday, and then we sat from dawn till dusk the whole family by the radio, because for the first time in my life the radio was speaking the truth. And although it was tense and sorrowful, those were grand moments. Because we felt that now, finally, the truth was being told. But that only lasted a short time.”

“Besides the fact that I was a teacher, I also helped my husband, who really did emigrate with the conviction that he must do something about the bad situation at home. Because when at home, he had neither the options nor the strength for it - he had that nasty incident with the State Security officers, who beat him up and left him in a forest. So he got in touch with radio stations abroad, and he maintained communications with the Chartists in Prague, and he passed their materials on to the media, to Western journalists. That is, with regard to the technical equipment available to us in the 1980s, we recorded the texts on improvised tape recorders connecting - illegally in fact - to the telephone. And in the evening, when I came home from work, we’d write out a clean version, copy it , translate it, put it in envelopes, send it to various media offices, institutions. We couldn’t have done it if we hadn’t had so many friends all over the world, who were partly emigrants from the many waves of emigration. There were Czechs living abroad who’d emigrated before Hitler - Pavel Tigrid - there were Czechs who’d emigrated before the Communists - Karel Schwarzenberg and his family. There were people in Sweden, England, America, even Australia, and all of them had just one thing on their mind. When I asked my husband, as a young woman in love: ‘Dearie, what’s on your mind?’, he’d say: ‘A change of regime.’”