Pavel Bratinka

"The Nazis claimed that people were unequal. And Communism, like I said, claimed that we were all equal, that our common value was zero! Officially, the Communists claimed that the man was nothing but a living matter, although complicated. Sorry, but that's the way it is... Then of course Stalin, when he treated people as if they were just a cinder, he behaved like a true Marxist-Leninist. As for them, a human being has no value. Envy and hatred, on the other hand, are given enormous value. This void, the fact that the man has no value, but this hatred and envy are of enormous value... You can feel clearly how much of a nonsense it is, with all those inherent contradictions.”

“[Q: I remember you really enjoyed reading Tolkien’s Hobbit with my dad, Tomáš Halík, and Zdeněk Neubauer. What took your interest?] Tolkien’s beautiful saga described the fight against evil, which is waged by various powers and in which every fighting creature must give its all. The experiences expressed in Tolkien’s books resonated with the life that we were living in Socialist Czechoslovakia. The models of thought and action that Tolkien expressed, we actually came up against, including the chapter that the film makers left out: after the heroes defeat the evil and return home, the evil had regrown - a caricature of its former self, but dangerous all the same. We experienced the same after 1989.”

“The library’s charm resided in the fact that you could read lots of dailies and weeklies there with just a one-day delay. The first three years, until sixty-eight, the American embassy’s car even brought magazines and newspapers directly to my house every week. And so I had so many issues of International Herald Tribune, Life, Newsweek, Time... that I could take a pitchfork to them.”

“The Dutch intelligence was terribly naïve. I remember speaking with a forty-something-old physicist in the canteen of the nuclear institute in September 1968. I asked him: ‘How far do you think Soviet tanks are from this canteen?’ He retorted that he had never asked himself the question. So I told him: ‘About 400 kilometres. That is a matter of two days for the Soviets.’ ‘Really?’ he gasped. Then I asked him how many people Stalin killed, and he said: ‘A thousand.’ And that man had a university degree! So you can paint yourself the picture, the Dutch had no idea what they were up against. The students protested against NATO, against the war in Vietnam... I was horrified to think I should live in such a country.”

“The hollowness of the communist ideology was evident in cases when someone came to the classroom during a civics class and began telling them how it was all derived from the ownership of production means – these notions like justice and beauty. It was such nonsense that even a ten-year-old boy would be able to tell if he looked around and saw his classmates, who were just ten years old but they were bragging and striving to look good in front of the girls, boasting who had better marbles and who was physically stronger. And suddenly some loony comes in and starts explaining them that all is derived from production means. I considered it totally stupid, and what was horrible about communism was that we had to listen to these perversities, to this intellectual vomit, and we even had to take exams for it and keep our mouths shut.”

“I returned to the battle, and I absolutely didn’t feel like an oppressed wretch – who would be put into a cage, beating with his chest against the wall and longing to be free as a bird. Not at all, I knew that this was out of question and that it was necessary to be here and help to put this regime down; from this point of view my life was thus easy. Firstly, I’m a believer, and this helps. Secondly, I had this rational conviction that it would come to an end and I would live to see it. And I was here willingly, which meant that had I not lived to see it, I would have never regretted it. In this respect it was thus very easy for me. People who didn’t have this support had to suffer through it and they spent years in prisons… In this respect I was still doing very well.”

“When Brezhnev died in 1982, I already lived as a somebody who is waiting for a bus, or waiting at a railway station for a train to come. I already lived in absolute certainty that I would live to see the fall of this regime, and still be relatively young; before that it was only wishful thinking. Vašek Benda was always telling the story how he was waiting in a queue for meat or potatoes in 1968, and people were saying how absurd it was, that it couldn’t last, and he told them: ´No way, this will last some twenty years or so.´ And the people nearly lynched him for pessimism and subversive talking. But he was absolutely right and in 1989 he just laughed about it.”