Jana Novotná

"When the Charter came out, they didn't even tell me. I came to see him [Klement Lukeš] in January. It's called Charter 77, but they made it before Christmas, that first little group. By then I visited Klement regularly - we would get documents, reproducing, distributing and so on. I told him I wanted to sign it, and Klement discouraged me. He said they needed me - I was still interpreting - and maybe I could go abroad, and that he thought I was doing useful work for them anyway. He didn't want me to sign it. I signed it, I think, in March of 1977 and said, 'Kléma, I do want to sign it,' and he said, 'We're not going to disclose you right away' hoping I could do some work. But then it came out soon anyway, and then of course I was fired from all interpreting."

"There weren't many of us simultaneous interpreters, so I interpreted during all of the most important events. There are a lot of funny stories. Most of them were from Cuba - who else was coming here speaking Spanish back then? There was a cultural session where Zdeněk Nejedlý spoke. He was already so senile that we couldn't understand him - the sentence didn't have a subject or a verb, and you can hardly interpret that simultaneously in the cabin. So we put one of us in the Czech booth, and he made up the whole speech, which was very easy at that time, because you were actually always fighting for peace - cows were yielding milk to fight for peace, cultural workers were fighting for peace and so on. It was amusing until a StB officer ran up and said, 'Comrades, Comrade Nejedlý has been quiet for a long time, and you are still interpreting!' We forgot to check..."