Jan Bednář

"Well, one day Petr Uhl came - it was Christmas 1976 - and brought the text of the Charter and asked if we wanted to sign it, and I think my mother had either signed it right away or had already signed it, I don't know. But he offered it to me or I just saw it there, I said I wanted to sign it too, so I read it or I had already, I feel like I had already read it before. But he just collected the signatures, this Peter Uhl, he was one of the few people who collected the signatures. So I signed it for him, and it had a strange peripeteia that my signature was not actually published in the first row, where the 245 signatures or how many, but only in the second row on the 1st of February. And the reason for that was that actually they, I was one of the few people who studied and signed the Charter, there were about two, there was me and Zina Freund Koçová at that time. And they somehow, there was some kind of a discussion about it, even Petr Uhl and the people I knew at that time, they said to me, 'Well, but if you sign it, you'll be fired from school, you know, of course.' I said, 'Sure, I know that,' because I had had enough of the school and I thought, 'I'm not going to play some communist economist somewhere, so I'm just going to give up, let them fire me.' So I was going to sign it, but somehow they decided to put it aside. And what happened was that Václav Havel had several signatures in his desk, and they sort of divided it up and they sorted the signatures and they had them deposited, so to speak, and I was deposited there too. But of course, I was only deposited there until January 6th, when the police came in and searched Havel's desk and found the signature there, so I was thus exposed. And that's also why they picked me up a week later."

"When we got there, it was about midnight, so we arrived at the train station in Vienna and we got off the train and we didn't know what to do. So we went to a hotel that was around the corner. Then it turned out in the morning that it was an hourly hotel, so we paid absolutely unbelievable money, but then we just went to some of those... We looked for some of these offices and then we slept one night in this dormitory which was absolutely horrible, it was some kind of a gymnasium where the Spartakiada deck chairs were laid out, where everybody who came from Czechoslovakia, crowds of people, so they stayed there. That was the first clue, and at the same time there were already some interviews going on, or we were filling in some questionnaire, who was who, from where and what and how. And there were some people from the embassy there or some people like that we met... Some immigration officials were there for sure."