"So on the other hand, they were suppressing it, so we were there like sardines, then it's starting to be a terrible drama. People fainted, shouted, cried. I shouted out loud, I could even hear on a tape, 'I have a little baby back at home.' Because I thought, 'Well, now beat me up here and what about poor Nikola.' I had a kind of existential experience there thinking that's possibly the end of what I'm going to do. Or I had a friend who can also be heard there shouting: "David, David." It's such a fact - that there were a few people there. Then I found out that there were about a thousand people. It was really disgusting. Then they made the alley where it's already glazed, so it was normally a passage, and the cops stepped in there and dragged you each. The boy in front of me, they tore the earrings out just like that. He was some kind of punk, after which they went terribly and they ripped the pin with a piece of his ear out. That was disgusting. In fact, they were terribly cruel and evil, hysteria reigned there, people roared and cried."
'My sister and I were just running into the Mikulandska Street and we ran into a house and we just ran all the way up. And there we sat on the stairs and cried because we were like, "'Jeez, what's that, what was all that for?"' We were really shocked. We sat there for quite a long time, like I don't know for an hour, we sat there for an hour or two, we just got really stressed out about it, we didn't know what to do next, then we snuck out of that house. We met Pavel Šafr in the street too, the one who publishes the Forum 24 magazine and he was our friend from Karlín. When we snuck out of that house, we looked around and it was just like after a battle, there was not a soul, there was no one, there were just shoes, sweaters, handbags, it was just like something out of a horror movie."
"We've been going to this Catholic society where the young ones came together, like others did. We used to ride with these girls and sleep at the rectory in Marianske Lazne. They found us there, which wasn't allowed, well just nothing was allowed, so even that wasn't allowed, and you shouldn't go to church. They picked us up and trapped us there. The whole squad came in, we were all girls there at the age of 15 years and they said we were junkies and accused us of definitely doing drugs, and they scared the shit out of us, the gunmen came running in. Well, it was absolutely disgusting. And then I had to be interrogated. They invited me to the police station in Bartholomew Street just before I went to high school, that was in ninth grade, I was about your age. That was kind of challenging. My mother came with me, I was quite scared. It was a classic, bad and good policemen act, and they wanted to know who I knew and who went to church and who didn't go and who said what and at school, who said what. Well, it was gross, and they said if I didn't say it, there wouldn't be allowed to attend the secondary school (gymnasium), even though I already passed the exams; this all took place during the vacations in the ninth grade.”
Ludmila Palatová was born on March 15, 1966 in Prague. At the beginning of the communist regime, her father served five years in the Leopoldov and Valdice prisons for an attempt to emigrate. She raised her three children in a strongly anti-communist manner. The family regularly went to church and Ludmila was even arrested as a teenager on a trip with the Catholic community. Ludmila and her sister attended the demonstration on November 17, 1989 and even got to the National Street, where the demonstration was brutally suppressed. After the Velvet Revolution, she graduated from the Faculty of Education, then began working as a teacher and proof reader. In 2021 she lived in Prague.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
