Hana Pechová

"Main Administration of Press Supervision, HSTD. For Supraphon, there was a comrade Daumová. It was so that whatever was written, you had to take it there. Nobody, no printing house would print you half a page of anything unless it had a stamp from the HSTD. For us it was the letter F asterisk and some number. That was taken to the printer like that. On the other hand, once it had that stamp, nobody would ponder what was written in the text."

"There was a terrible atrocity going on because in the 1970s they were physically destroying [the records]. They were destroying Bibles. Superbly recorded. I may have been unbaptized, but the Bible is the Bible. It was a work of art. They were wonderfully narrated albums. Do you know how they disposed of them? They drilled holes in it so it couldn't be played. I think that was an atrocity because it was beautifully voiced. Between you and me, it was sure that people would listen to it. It's a chore to read, but when you have it in an artistic rendition, you perceive it in a completely different way."

"So we drove through and suddenly a guy with a machine gun, a soldier, jumped out and stopped us. They were looking for, I don't know what they were told, they were looking for some papers. They were looking for some printed documents, apparently, they assumed we were going to have them. We didn't have it, we didn't even have a radio, although in Austria an Austrian offered us to get one, we said we didn't need it. Well, so when the soldier popped up there, the kids were spooked."

"It was just that kind of uncertain time when there was one deputy, there was the head of the department, one had his crew, the other had his crew. But they were sitting in Palacký Street. We were sitting in Jindřiška Street, so to speak dislocated. And then one day when the head left the office, I noticed that something was chirping. And he was recording us. That was kind of that time at the start of the year seventy-two when things weren't so heated yet. He was a completely uneducated guy, and I said, I can't work with a guy like that. And that's how I got into the [record] club, in 1973. It was a dislocated workplace with very specific activities, including the girls taking [letters] to the post office. We were away from the main corporate affairs, where the managers changed in and out. We were kind of in the lee of it."

"When Czechs won the hockey match against the Russians, in the sixty-ninth year, and our Michal, who was ten years old at the time, and Vojta, who lived across the street, they wrote on the road with a piece of chalk those 4:3 and 2:0 scores, it was nice, well, boys, well... We had a lady in the basement who was a comrade in some street committee, meaning she was snitching on us. That was also why Michal had such a problem getting admitted to the school... The worst people are always the ones who are into this... The truth is that we didn't destroy Strougal's Orchards before the Aeroflot, but there were all the cars driving around, honking, flags, it was such a... when I look at it today, it was a small act of resistance."