"I rate this really positively, it's something incredible. They're really amazing in this respect. They do it all the time when there is a need for help, even in Ukraine. They don't talk about it like that, that they are the best, but they really help. And it is the people who help, personally. And that's what they've always done. This is a society based on personal activity. I'm just going to be a part of it! There's something wrong here, so I'll put some money in." (And should we do that too?) "Yeah, but it's just going to take a while."
"Niels Barfoed was one of the really important journalists of this Politiken. And he was also a professor of Danish, lecturing on literature and stuff. Unlike the Danes, he made sure that when he said something in his deep voice, he commanded a certain respect. And he was even happy to evoke it. The Danes don't like to command respect, but this guy liked to command it. And everybody noticed him, he was different, he was big, he had a deep voice, Danes have more of a shouting voice. And this Barfoed was dating a friend of mine, my age, a generation younger than him. That's why I knew him, through that friend, and that he was a journalist. And by coincidence, I met him at the airport, and he was also going to Prague. I said, that's interesting that you're going to Prague. And I thought he was acting strange, this guy. And he says to me - can I sit with you? I said - you can, are you afraid to fly? So we asked the stewardess if she would put us together next to each other, and he says, Barefoed - I'm going to give this money to Havel. I said, yeah? Where do you keep this money? He says - here. He just had it in this little pouch that you carry around, like a tourist pouch."
"That time, as I say, was terrible. And then there was the Anticharter. That's what I would say about the Anticharter, that it actually marked the mood much more than the Charter intself. The Charter was such a - well, yeah, we'll see. The Anticharter, that was clear. That was such a shitty thing to say. And it actually exposed the cards of that society. I know my mum was terrible about it too. Jesus, how could that guy over there sign it? And even though people now say that Werich signed it because he was old, because he was so and so, it made a big impression on my father that Werich signed it. That was just a moral collapse. So I was very happy to leave that circus."
Martina Schepelern was born in 1955 in Prague into the family of writers Věra Stiborová and Jaroslav Putík, a former resistance fighter and prisoner of the Dachau concentration camp. She spent a significant part of her childhood in the „writer‘s“ castle Dobříš in the company of well-known authors of the time. She lived through the August 1968 occupation in Budislav, also a recreational facility of the writers‘ community. After 1968, both her parents returned their Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) party legitimation, had to stop publishing, and had to devote themselves to more menial jobs and self-publishing. Martina graduated from high school in 1973, but was not admitted to university studies due to a cadre assessment. In the spring of 1977, the year of the Charter and Anticharter, she married the Danish film critic Peter Schepelern, which allowed her to travel legally to Denmark, where she still lives today. She participated in a meeting of Danish intellectuals in the National Theatre building, where the structure of Danish civic aid to Czechoslovak dissidents was established.
In the winter of 1986, Martina Schepelern was an indirect participant in the presentation of an award from Politiken and Dagens Nyheter daylies to Czechoslovak Chartists, which was brought to Václav Havel by the journalist Niels Barfoed from Copenhagen to Prague. In 1988, her father Jaroslav Putík was awarded the Egon Hostovský Literary Prize, among other things for his novel The Man with the Razor, the manuscript of which Martina smuggled out of the country. In 2010, a short film documentary, The Affair in Prague, was made, whose main protagonists are Niels Barfoed, Martina Schepelern, Václav Havel and Stb officers.
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!
