Soňa Balcárková

"My brother came here one day and was reading it and didn't tell us anything, fool, and he took a few of the articles away and gave it to somebody to read, and some of his friends reported him to the police. In Horní Planá, somebody wanted to show off, so they arrested him and took him to Pilsen. Now I´ll go back to Prague: my mother had flu, she was lying down, she was ill at home. She had time, she didn't have a fever anymore, so she took the archive, all the newspaper columns...we already had the archive here, because it was after the Charter, they were already arresting, and we had it at home from Věra [Št'ovíčková] so they wouldn't take it from her. Also some Svědectví (Testimony) magazine that she used to get, and Tigrid and Literary Papers and Škvorecký...she spread it out on her bed and was reading it. There was a manager in her pharmacy who defrauded some money because he had been dealing medicines, and so they interrogated him and interrogated the other pharmacists. So she was in bed, she was reading this, and suddenly the bell rang and two policemen outside the door were saying, 'You must come with us to Bartolomějská Street [police headquarters]'. Mum thought it was because of the manager, so she said to them, quite calmly, 'Well I can't, I'm ill and on sick leave.' 'We'll take you there and back.' They wanted to interrogate them together to be able to inform each other what they were saying. So Mum said, 'Right, well wait downstairs, I've got to get dressed. ' Luckily they got to the car, they sat down, so my mum packed up the newspaper articles, took them up to the attic, stuck them up there. Just in case, she didn't think about it at all, and she stuck them behind the beam in the plastic bag, where the roof ends. They took her to Bartolomějská Street, it wasn´t about the manager, but newspaper columns, resistance. We had already been instructed to say: 'It was in the letterbox. We don't know where it came from. It wasn't a letter, it was put in there.' Fortunately, Honzík was saying the same thing. Mum also said, 'But they're our [Czechoslovak] writers.' How were they supposed to explain to her that they're forbidden [writers] if it wasn´t admitted officially. They didn't shut down the Semafor theatre either, but Suchý wasn't allowed to go on the radio, on TV, he barely had one or two records published. There were two [policemen] with her: a young one, an old one. The young one started to be arrogant with her. Now a look back to the Gestapo in Kolín, I can see my mum: she was sitting there, she looked down on him and said: 'You can´t scare me with that, I know that from the Gestapo'. The old man draw back, she stopped him, and then they let her go. And then it faded out. Honzík didn't even get fired from his job, it wasn't worth it, because they didn't find out much: the letterbox, the Gestapo, the writers, so they just let it be."

"When people got into the houses, there were maybe sixty people in one flat where they were let in. A person who was sitting in the house in the attic, people unlocked the door for them and locked them in there again, maybe, and then they let them out, on the second floor there was blood, pools of blood on the stairs. Another guy who was squeezed on a door that came loose, he burst in and the door slammed shut again. There were shreds of clothes on the street, pools of blood, he'd never seen it in his life that this was possible without shooting, that they could do this with just their hands and batons. Terrible."

"We sent them almost all the books. That was another tension, everything was. We used to take it to the customs office. You could only send a five-kilo package and only five of them. They checked it, of course, it wasn't allowed to be wrapped. Then I noticed that the customs officers were annoyed, they were lazy, he inspected the first one, the second one, and then the third one, the fourth one not so much, and he said, 'Well, wrap it up'. So I didn't put it in the fifth one, because sometimes he skipped it cunningly: the first and the fifth package, but [I put it] in the fourth one. That's where they had Masaryk, for example. I thought it would be a shame if they took the books away from them. Maybe they would just say we couldn't send them, but who knew, and you couldn't ask them what you can and can't do. That was always nerve-wracking. We used to go there in the car with Mum or Dad. We sent everything to them and it turned out fine."

"When the Charter [77 affair] broke out, homo politicus here, I was in the mountains. We heard it on the news there, I said, 'I have to go to Prague, what am I going to do?' As we were brought up in Marxism-Leninism, I was saying that now people will be arrested and we have to support their families. So I came to Prague, I went around to all the people in the hospital and I collected 1850 crowns at a time when our salary was eight hundred. I went to Věra [Št'ovíčková] and gave it to her to distribute it. Then I continued every month, somebody gave twenty, somebody gave fifty [crowns], and I always evened it up somehow and brought her the money. Even friends who couldn´t make ends meet contributed, and there was always something. She'd give me newspaper columns and I'd copy them. We still had Karel Příhonský's typewriter, so his typewriter still experienced that [anti-communist] resistance. When there was new tape, sometimes up to thirteen [copies], but that was barely legible. Eleven was still possible, and it had to be on very thin paper. So I used to distribute the columns."

"I have always thought we should have defended ourselves in the year 1939. One per cent, if the Poles had come and a part of France had had the courage and maybe some in Austria and some in Germany...We had a good army then, but we were on our own. I understand they [Czechs] were scared, when Hácha was threatened that they [Germans] would bomb everything here. It can´t be said with certainty, nothing is black and white, but they should have defended themselves. And most likely we would have lost, but those guys would have died with guns in their hands on the border, not in concentration camps and gas chambers and at the shooting range in Kobylisy. And the nation wouldn't have been so spine-broken."