Doc. Ing. Jiří Všetečka

“When I took pictures in August 1969, it was very difficult to do so because the soldiers and Public Security [police] officers cordoned off the street. So you could only take shots, say, from a tram. I talked with the tram driver, and he opened a window for me, and I took the picture through that. Then we stood below the ramp and started to sing the anthem. And that’s when they rushed us. It was a massacre. When they’re mashing you up and spraying tear gas at you, that’s really not good. And to top it all, I still had a small camera and some films in my pocket. I thought to myself: ‘I’m in trouble.’ They herded us together and prepared to take us away in an Anton [a nickname for the Robur LO 2500 minibus used by the Czechoslovak police - trans.]. The ones they took were locked up and interrogated for two to fourteen days. I couldn’t see properly because I was bleeding. And suddenly a tall bloke leans on me like this and says: ‘What are you doing here?’ I looked at him, and it occurred to me it might be my friend from last year [a policeman whom he had met while photographing in August 1968 - ed.]. It was probably him. I don’t know, I can’t swear to it. I just told him: ‘I was on my way to some friends, I’m here by chance.’ ‘Then go!’ He turned round and stood so that the commander, who was ordering us around and bullying us, wouldn’t see me disappear. I managed to cross the street together with one other person. They took the rest. I ran into the first house, where they let me clean myself up. Because if someone’d walk along the street with blood stains, or with some other cause for suspicion, the cops would nab him. I went home clean, and I immediately set about developing the films. So that was 1969.”

[After publishing a new edition of Jan Amos Komenský (Comenius): Labyrinth of the World and Paradise of the Heart in the BRD in 1972] “...they sent me two copies before Christmas. One was for me and one for Professor Patočka. They were supposed to send more copies, but I didn’t get them. So I wrote to them that they hadn’t come and that they should send some more. That they’d been lost. So they sent me some more. They were lost again. And instead of that, I received an invitation to the ‘Tile House’ in Letná [the State Security station - ed.], where they had them. And they started a big interrogation. They wanted to prove to me that it was subversive literature. And I refuted that. The book is written in Old Czech and Old German. It was edited by Professor Patočka and Professor Schaller, who were experts on Komenský and on philology. They didn’t care about that, they had their own explanation. Say for the photograph for when the text expresses that it is beautiful to set out somewhere and not reach it. For this wonderful, I chose a photo of a snow-filled Letná Field. I made my own footprints on it, and so that you couldn’t go any further forward, there was a barbed-wire fence there. Their interpretation was: ‘This is our border, and emigrants are fleeing across the border.’ We went through the book like that, but sometimes I just couldn’t explain it to them. ‘One does this, and another does that. But all of these things are of little use and of little appropriacy for such grand exhibition.’ This text was accompanied by a photo of two men in a May Day parade, playing Chess and carrying flags at the same time. It was an awful situation. It got even more extreme: ‘This is a war, and these are Soviet soldiers - you’re talking about our friends?’ And I said: ‘Whose are soldiers with expressions. And how do you know they are Russian soldiers? I can’t tell.’ ‘You can tell that according to the helmets.’ ‘Or here, and we’ll be including this in the report, this is [Prague-]Vinohrady in flames.’ I explained: ‘Yes, Vinohrady in flames. I cropped it so that it wouldn’t be possible to identify either the time or the place of origin. And it’s about war being dreadful, that many people die in wars. Do you like that, comrades?’ The interrogation lasted eight hours, and they gently insinuated that they can use one sheet of paper, which had a red stripe on it, which meant [taking me into] custody. Luckily they didn’t do that. But I wasn’t able to talk my way through everything. The book was sold abroad in the end. They forbade me from corresponding with Professor Schaller in any way. I only managed to write to him that I was at the faculty and that I wasn’t allowed to write to him any more. And he replied that he was also in trouble, that his correspondence was monitored.”