“You could see how prisons marked people. This was not only Magor but also Kečup, who returned as an idiot. He was absolutely demoralised. You couldn’t be with him, really… Actually more and more people went into prison, then disappeared for a while, then they returned, but they didn’t return into the community. I think this was the worst thing even for those around them and this may have been the reason why so many people left the country. When there was the Vokno trial [an underground samizdat] in 1981, we didn’t know whether they arrest Šíma, myself or someone else. Whoever of us wrote an article, could be arrested and put into prison. They put into prison Magor, who wrote an article, Martin Hýbek, who helped with Vokno, Čuňas… you really didn’t know whether you get arrested or not.”
“At half past five or at five they rang our bell and told us we had to go for interrogation immediately. And that they brought a person from the Municipal Committee to look after them. And that I was to call my mother immediately to take my daughter to the kindergarten. Then they took us away for an interrogation, I spent twelve hours there. I didn’t know whether my mother was with Jana or not. Šíma was taken to Litoměřice, no one told me that. I knew he would not take any food from them, so I sent him some. They ate it.”
“There were dense fogs, stinking of what they just released. And in the autumn, during the smog season, you could not see a step ahead. The fog was so dense that people felt their way forward and walked almost by memory. I remember that even walking to school we held each other’s hand in order not to get lost… And the trams. We lived near the terminal station, there was a kind of turn, one of the first railway lines, and the tram took people into the factory, where 35,000 people were employed in the chemical plants.”
“I really enjoy František Porky Stárek nowadays. You could invite him to give a talk at school some day. He’s brilliant. And of course, Havel. There was a period when he was ill - I’m not really a religious person per se, I don’t go to church, but at the time I prayed a lot for him to recover. Be it as it may, he knew how to formulate ideas in ways that I just can’t. And the way he talked, he talked for all of us. He talked the way we felt about things as well. And there are others, of course. Loony [Ivan “Magor” Jirous - trans.] was one of them. I was fond of everyone who used to come here, and we still keep in touch.”
“When I was fourteen, in August, when we were on holiday, we went for a walk in forest in the morning, we were staying at a cottage that didn’t have any radio or anything. When we were coming back, the whole village was gathered on the square, everyone was crying, and we didn’t know what was going on. They told us we were being attacked by Russian soldiers, and a moment later we experienced the real thing because a column of tanks drove through the village. We were already quite old for children, and we had the courage to go there and threaten them, even though they aimed their guns at us. It wasn’t exactly easy, I still have gloomy memories of the occupation. And that’s when the defiance was sparked, none of us had ever seen our country invaded. And there was no reason for it, no one understood it.”
“When I signed Charter 77 in 1978, I already knew that I was sure to be interrogated, or to lose my job, or that something would happen. That I’m risking something by signing it. But I took the risk gladly because I had a daughter and my friends, for whom I signed the Charter. Because human rights are important for everyone. I had to sign it. And it didn’t see it as an alternative that I wouldn’t sign it. It was a done thing, basically. And it was as I had expected, I was soon summoned for questioning, soon enough my husband and I received flat inspections, soon enough I wasn’t allowed to do the job I had been doing before, and I also never got a pay rise any more. And those wages were getting slimmer and slimmer. Then when I wanted to apply to study, all my colleagues were accepted, only I wasn’t. For no reason. No one gave any justification.”
Silvestra “Silva” Chnápková, née Lupertová, was born on April 30, 1954 in České Budějovice. From an early age, however, she grew up in Litvínov, where her father, a chemist and scientific researcher, was assigned to a chemical plant. She describes the ecologically devastated environment of northern Bohemia and the subculture of hairy “Máničky” (young people with long hair, typically men, in Czechoslovakia through the 1960s and 1970s. Long hair for males during this time was considered an expression of political and social attitudes in communist Czechoslovakia). The formative experience for her was the August invasion of 1968 and the subsequent normalization. In 1975, she gave birth to a daughter, whom she raised as a single woman. Around that time, she met people from the underground in Prague - František “Čuňas” Stárek, Jarda Kukal, Londýn and others. She started going with them to Nová Víska u Chomutova, one of the “houses” of the underground, where an open community of like-minded people was formed. There she also met “Šíma”, ie Jaroslav “Šimako” Chnápek, her future husband. Jaroslav Chnápek signed Charter 77 in January 1977, and Silvestra added its signature a year later. Both also participated in the distribution of the samizdat magazine Vokno. After the communist authorities expropriated the house in Nová Víska in 1981 and imprisoned Vokno editor-in-chief František “Čuňas” Stárek and other friends, most of the former inhabitants of Nová Víska emigrated. Silvestra and Jaroslav Chnápek discovered a mill in Osvračín in the Domažlice region through an advertisement and bought it in the name of the witness’s mother so that the State Security could not thwart the transaction. In Osvračín they wanted to lead a similar life as before in Nová Víska - they organized concerts, festivals and meetings of friends from the underground. However, they did not escape from the bullying of the communist secret police, which tried to drive them out also from Osvračín. The lands which they were trying to farm were expropriated again, and when they began to make a living producing ceramics instead of raising animals, the buildings were gradually expropriated too. The final verdict came a month before November 1989 - they had to evacuate everything within two months and hand it over to the local collective farm except for a small living premises. Osvračín thus became the last homestead in Czechoslovakia expropriated under the laws of the 1950s. Their eviction was prevented by the Velvet Revolution. In the end, they stayed in Osvračín, repaired the mill and built a boarding house and the successful Vokno Gallery in it.
