Petr Veselý

"During the Bolshevik era you graduated from school, went to work somewhere, and unless you made some cardinal screw-up, you retired from that very place, that very job. Not that this is universally true, of course. But the perception, the feeling was exactly that. Things were a given. Things were clear. That's the way it was. You graduate from elementary school, you don't get into high school, you go work the shovel, and that's where you retire. You go to high school, you don't get into college, well, see if you can do something, and if you can't, you're gonna stay down somewhere. Those things were obvious. I went to JAMU to study directing and it was clear that I would get a job at a theater. A director was the so-called middle-management cadre, so they were expected to join the Communist Party. If they behaved well all the time, they would become the artistic director, the director. And then they would retire. That was a given. There are shops in the streets. Now, you walk down the street and you notice: this shop is no longer here - this was a drugstore before, and now they sell dog kibble. There was no such thing back then. There were the same shops all the time. They were always the same shops, they had the same goods. There was one laundry detergent on the shelf. There was no normal movement. What I think one perceives as normal movement today wasn't there. It was dead, it was stagnant. By movement, I mean a philosophical category. Movement is one of the basic attributes of life. Things that are alive move. The world didn't move. What was life like under the Bolsheviks? Static, grey, in fact, from that broad perspective, it was extraordinarily boring."

"It was 68, especially August 68, and I was three years old. I remember very little of it, but do I remember something. There are some bits and pieces in my head. I'm from Prague, and I used to live not far from the big Dejvice roundabout. It's a circular square and there were two or three playgrounds in a part of it that is no longer there. Big sandpits surrounded by a massive concrete circle and with a lot of sand inside. One sandpit was as big as this room. I recall being in that sandbox and there's three tanks standing around and pointing at that sandbox. I remember that, I was with my dad and I was excited as a kid, it was fantastic. Then I remember, we lived in Dejvice, which is about eight, nine kilometres away from the Ruzyně airport. I remember the night of the 21st of August when the military planes were landing over us at Ruzyně. I remember the noise. My mother was a Volhynian Czech, she was born in Volhynia before World War II. She had a hysterical fit that night as the planes were landing, which is something she didn't normally get. She locked herself in the bathroom and cried and screamed terribly that the war was starting. That was a very difficult, traumatic moment for her."