Igor Brossmann

“On the evening of the demonstration on Národní třída street in Prague, I found myself in a pub in a small village called Nový Život (‘New Life’ in English) Everyone was speaking Hungarian, I don’t understand a single word in Hungarian. There was footage of the demonstration on Hungarian TV, while there was nothing yet on the Slovak channels. Everyone was drinking beer and having shots. Nobody paid attention to the TV; it felt like some surrealist movie. I was staring at the screen; I saw the police beating some people. I saw that the footage was from Prague, but I couldn’t understand the commentary and nobody cared to explain it to me. Nobody cared about what was going on. That’s how my ‘new life’ began."

“On one occasion, we made sculptures of people and hung them on trees, but it was just for artistic purposes, as a happening. And I remember how they woke me up at 3 a.m. and they told me to take the sculptures down, because comrade Gorbachev was about to pass by, and it was unacceptable to have people hanging from trees. And then they asked us who told us to do it. During one interrogation, I invented a fictional character, someone like Cimrman , and I said: ‘It was Viktor, Viktor asked us to do it.’ And the gentleman interrogating me finally smiled, happy that he had made me talk, and on a Soviet cast-iron typewriter branded ‘Jantár’, he typed: ‘Viktor asked them to do it.’ And he was satisfied. I realised that we could blame whatever we did on this fictional character and we would be safe. Since then, I would always give them the same answer and they would put it down in their report.”