Mgr. Josef Picek

"It was a question of the personal bravery of the people who did or did not stand up for someone. I sometimes feel sorry when these people are forgotten. And when totalitarian times are turned into a monolith of mud. For example, when I read in the newspapers that Jaroslav Seifert was not allowed to publish at all. That's not true at all. First, he published individual collections, and then he even published collected writings. It was always a question of the editor in question having the courage and strength to stand up for the work and somehow push it through. It didn't always succeed, but very often it did. So the era was far from monolithic, it was quite very complicated and somehow things of real value could be pushed through."

"Václav Rabas was appointed director of the newly established conservatory as a kind of political guarantee, because I think he was already a member of the Federal Assembly at the time. Václav was a very complex personality. I personally have rather good memories of him, because he - as soon as the school was founded, he took me in. Even though at that time, for political reasons, I couldn't have a normal audition. So he took me on part-time - I tutored part-time and I taught part-time at this newly established school. And after a year, I went for a normal audition and became a regular teacher. And I can say that I was not the only one who was a political troublemaker at this school. And not only were they at this school, but they even held leadership positions there. Vaclav Rabas made me head of the Music Theory Department at that time. The head of the Wind Department was Ota Tvrdý, who also had some big political problems from Prague. The head of the String Department was Ivan Štraus, who, after he divorced the woman he married in Russia, was not at all well politically. And with a squad like that, he just built the conservatory. Miroslav Raichl came there a little later. He was another screw-up. We knew each other very well, because I went to the Zdeněk Nejedlý University Art Ensemble at the University of Economics when I was studying at the University of Education, and Slávek Neumann and Mirek Raichl were in charge there at that time. And Mirek Raichl at that time, in that year, in the sixty-eight, even worked on the Central Committee of the Party, which was the worst political qualification he could have developed, but he was just an enthusiast. He wanted to build something positive. He was never a communist in the true sense of the word, but he was a very positive person for many years. Then it broke him down a little bit - after August [1968] and after that incipient normalization, he was basically almost liquidated, he wasn't allowed to play at all. The only thing that kept him going were the children's choirs that sang it."

"But the interesting thing was that shortly after I won the competition I was forbidden by order of the head of the regional committee to perform in public, so I requested an audience with him. And I brought him the reviews that I had from the competition and I said, 'How does that compare to being banned from performing?' Because at that time, the circumstances were really very unpleasant in that the only way to give public concerts was through an agency, and there were a lot of other considerations besides the performance itself. And if it was some kind of a composed show, you had to make a direct play for that show. I will not forget how we did a programme with Radek Bartoník, an actor from the Hradec Králové theatre, from the poems of Josef Kainar, it was from the collection "Lazarus and the Song", which is such a harsh poetry. And the committee didn't like it, but Kainar was the president of the Writers' Union at the time. So it was a bit of a dance between the eggs on their part, and they finally allowed it, but it was obvious that they were very reluctant. It really depended on who liked and didn't like what. And it also depended on whether one had personal enemies. Which I didn't. Many of my colleagues, for example, from the radio station - they had to go to the shovel because they were not qualified and they had enemies. And if in the 1960s I was not aware of and did not admit any political limitations at all, then from 1970 onwards I was aware of them very harshly."

"We got in the car and took the shortest way home. And I immediately got on the radio, and then I didn't come home for 14 days. I worked and we slept on the ground and it was very adventurous. It was organized, so we had several workplaces around the city in Hradec and I was still in the recording studio with a few colleagues and outside collaborators from the theater. That was in the Old Town, it doesn't exist anymore, and we were patched through there, we had on-air input. It was a tremendous school, because we were talking without any preparation and going around town recording interviews with people. We watched what was going on. and we were trying to keep it going somehow. We were the longest-running radio studio, and that was because we were staffed by Poles, Hradec Kralove. And they sabotaged it somewhat. I wasn't there, but I heard a story that there was a tank that drove up to the main building, in front of the studio headquarters. A Polish major got out there and wanted the director to give it to him. And he told him if he had a certificate from the central director. The Pole said he didn't. The director told him he had nothing to hand over, so he refused. The Pole saluted and left."