Vladimír Valeš

"I went to him and said I needed to take some photos. And he said, ‘Yeah, we have a copier here, you know, one of those spirit duplicators. But be careful—we have to do the copying when we’re alone so that no one comes in. And most importantly, there’s a counter that tracks the copies, so you have to write down in a special notebook what you copied and how many copies you made.’ And I said, ‘Alright, I’ll come around four o’clock when no one’s here.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ So I already had one paper prepared—Freedom for Stanislav Devátý—which we had mimeographed at Škarýd’s place. And I thought, Damn, this is great! We’ll put it in, and it’ll make 200 copies for us. So Lumír and I placed it on the scanner glass, and sure enough, we made about 200 copies. I took the whole package to Žatec and we put it up there. But we forgot to take the original out of the scanner glass, we forgot the original. And the next morning the economic deputy came to work and went to copy some crap and found this 'Freedom to Stanislav Devátý'. And Lumír called me and said, 'Dude, shit, Justián came to me and said, "Lumír, did you copy something on the photocopier?" And I said, "No, I didn't, I didn't, really, Mr. Engineer." And he says, "Well, somebody copied something." "What?" "Some freedom for Stanislav Devátý." He didn't know him!'"

"I was at work in Postoloprty and the HR manager called me to say that some gentlemen wanted to talk to me. I was in a good mood and I said, 'What do they want?' And she said, 'I don't know, Vladimir, come here and see', and I figured it might be the cops and I said, 'Well, should I bring my toothbrush and my pajamas and stuff?' And she said, "Well, I don’t know," her voice turning serious over the phone. So I got back on my Liberta bike and I rode down the hill from the office and I went to that headquarters, that passage and I turn in. There were two of them standing there again, but different, in plain clothes. They said, 'Are you Mr. Valeš?' I was sitting on the bike, one leg resting casually on the asphalt, and I said, 'Well, I'm Mr. Valeš.' 'Then you'll come with us.' And I said, 'I'm not coming with you.' 'If you want to talk to me, just call me or text me somehow or I don't know, but I'm not going anywhere with you and I'm certainly not going to talk to you.' I turned around on that bike, went back to my office. I was sitting there at the table, and then it hit me: Damn, in a moment, they’ll be here and take me away. They’ll drag me somewhere and beat me up. But then... nothing happened."

"Then I went on working happily in the state farm and I'm sitting in my office like this. And suddenly the phone rang, the military administration from Louny called. A major, I don't know his name, was very comical and told me that I had three days to report to the barracks in Louny and that I had 48 hours to report there. And I said that I wasn't going to enlist and that I didn't know of any draft order. And he said, 'Don't think if you don't pick up your mail that our laws don't apply to you,' and 'You violated this and that paragraph, this and that section, and you're subjecting yourself to such and such a penalty.' Well, I was brave and I told him, 'No, I'm not going,' and I hung up the phone. Well, and then during the course of that day I walked around the yard there. We had a warehouse about 200 yards from the office, and I went to the warehouse. And then when I came out of the warehouse, suddenly a military gas truck came into the yard in Postoloprty. I thought, 'Dude, they're coming for you.' And so I turned around, and I went back. There was this huge granary, about five stories high, baroque, old, beautiful, full of grain. I ran up the stairs to the fifth floor and hid behind the sacks of grain. I thought, they can't find me here because they don't know where I am. So I hid behind a sack of grain for about an hour. So I went down the stairs, I got to the warehouse and I said to the warehouse manager, 'Call my office to see if the soldiers are still there.' So she called and the secretary said, 'What soldiers?' 'Mr. Valeš here says there are some soldiers.' 'Oh no, they went to Dana.' That was our publicity officer, who had an office across the hall. They went there to get some paint because they were preparing a banner for May Day or some celebration. So I thought they came for me, but they didn't come for me. And the interesting thing was that I didn't get any recourse from that, and I had actually quit, I had terminated my employment with the military administration and with all of our glorious military, but nothing ever happened."

"So we had a few beers and then we left the pub and went to the cultural centre where the entertainment was supposed to be. There were other girls standing there, they had already bought tickets and they were grumbling that they didn't want to let them in, that there were some organizers there and that they didn't like the fact that they had long hair. Suddenly, there were, I don't know, maybe a thousand of them, an awful lot. And the organizers were few, there were three or four. And even two policemen showed up and they had their car parked in front of the cultural centre. I think it was some kind of Moskvich or something. Well, and as the Máničky (the longhairs), as we Máničky had had a couple of those beers, we decided to go over there and deal with them. So we all climbed up the stairs to the community centre and as there were a lot of us, we went up, there was this glass wall, and we broke the glass, we went inside into this sort of foyer and it started to grind. Then somehow the local villagers got mixed up in it and they didn't like the fact that a bunch of "Máničky" were going in there, so they pushed us out again. And now some kid came up to me and said, 'Hey, look, dude, they left your friend there.' I turned around and saw poor Fašoun standing there, his forehead pressed against the wall, his feet half a meter away from it. And right next to him was a cop. Well, I was an 18-year-old kid, right? So I walked inside, went straight to the cop, and said, ‘Hey, let him go! If you let him go, everything will be fine, and we’ll all leave.’ The cop looked at me and said, ‘Oh yeah? Wait here.’ He went to talk to the other cop, and after a while, he came back. ‘Alright, take him and get out, but you all have to leave!’ I pulled Fašoun out through the broken entrance and onto the stairs—there were "Máničky" everywhere. And I said, ‘Here we are, we made it, we’re free!’ And they all went, ‘Yeeaah!’ And in all that excitement, they started rocking the police Moskvitch until they flipped it onto its roof."