"Nothing happened in Trutnov [on 17 November], but we quickly learned about it from Free Europe. On Monday, 20 November, we agreed at work that we would go for it too. Quite spontaneously we met as we knew each other in the wider circle of people who were signing and circulating petitions. We met there unplanned, as we had heard about it on the radio or from someone who had been in Prague. For example, Daniela Pokorná, the pastor's wife, was on Národní Street and brought the news to Trutnov. The first demonstration on November 20 in Trutnov was one of the first among smaller towns. We gathered at the fountain. There were already more uniformed people there than civilians. We were glad to be together. They asked for our IDs. The chairman of the local national committee was also there, calling for us to disperse. He immediately warned one colleague he knew that we would have a bad time. Radek [Langhammer] suggested that we make a procession to the church. Then we went back to the fountain in the square, sang the anthem and parted."
"I called everyone together and said there would be interrogations. Those who are in positions [of the Union of University Students] are in positions and they are reported.' But we had a wide circle of people who participated in these actions, organized them, and did a huge amount of work, basically semi-illegal, distributing banned texts and so on. We weren't allowed to talk about them in the interrogation. We couldn't even talk about our activities. We destroyed the archive at the beginning of the summer and I hid a little bit. I handed it over to the Ostrava archives after the Velvet Revolution."
"Our comrade director, who was not a communist, worried the most that he would have it bad again because he did not have a 100% success rate in joining Pioneer. At home, my mother was more afraid than my father. Dad wondered and told me that I should join. He asked me why I didn't join, and I said I just didn't want to. And it went off without difficulties. The fact is that in the seventh grade, Pepík Šimek, the son of a kulak, and I had already entered. They told us that we were good students and we wouldn't go to secondary school unless we joined Pioneer. In the cinema in Budišov, everyone from the third grade was standing and they put us two in the front row as seventh graders. These are life moments that we are not proud of, but this is how they were."
Aleš Bouda was born on 18 December 1947 into a religious family in Hranice na Moravě. When his father Vladimír’s business was nationalized after the communist coup in 1948, the family moved to the border village of Svatoňovice. At school, they threatened him that if he did not join the Pioneer organization, he would not get into secorndary school. Aleš Bouda eventually enrolled in Příbram and continued his studies at the Mining University in Ostrava. After the death of Jan Palach, he organised an unauthorised demonstration in Ostrava as the chairman of the Union of University Students. From then on, State Security took an interest in him as a hostile person of the third degree. In 1971, he moved to Trutnov and worked there throughout the entire normalisation in the East Bohemian coal mines. Since the beginning of 1989 he joined many petitions and helped to spread them. In November 1989, he organised demonstrations in Trutnov, co-founded the Civic Forum and organised a visit by Václav Havel the following year. After the Velvet Revolution he studied law and made a living in this field. He was still living in Trutnov at the time of recording in 2023.
