Ivan Chvatík

"We were doing it by copying [Patočka's] things, which had already come out in some way, for example before the war, so we made copies on xerox and we were putting these copies in samizdat volumes, both so that it wouldn't have to be rewritten on a typewriter and there would be no mistakes in it. On the other hand, so that it could serve as a reliable document, because those things could not be borrowed from the library. If we didn't have them and needed them from the library, we had to get them by someone who was employed there and secretly brought it to us. And how did the xeroxing happen? At the beginning of 1976, I was at a short military training for midfielders in Kbely, where I met Jiří Vrtiška, who was the same age and was also at the training. It turned out that he was the head of the copy office at the Ministry of Finance and that he was also a decent person - he was in the party for greedy reasons, but he was originally the son of a scout, a woodsman. So, I started trying to see if we could make copies at his work. Of course, I had a small xerox by the computer at work, but since those selenium drums soon scratched and left smudges on the copies that were exactly the same on each copy, it was clear that if anyone wanted to identify where the copy came from, he would easily find out. At the time, they those copiers were few in the state, certainly all on the list, and it wouldn't be a problem for them to find out. So, I made copies there just for my personal little use. However, with Vrtiška, I finally achieved that he was copying samizdat stuff for me on a really large scale. We managed to develop it in such a way that I went to him twice a week, I always brought a big bag with a small box of documents and I took the same bag, or two, full of copies. I didn't have a car, so I carried it by subway from Malostranská, where the Ministry of Finance is around the corner, to Můstek. I lived in Nekázanka, so I brought it home from Můstek. To this day, I don't know if the police knew and how. I think that if they knew that such a large amount of copying existed, they could not have imagined that it could be done without a car. I didn't have one, so I was probably out of the game. That's how it went."

"They let us go there because we went there by tram. The cemetery was full of people, so we knew it was possible to get there. But we know they didn't let car visitors in, they stopped them far in front of the cemetery. It happened in a familiar way: disturbed by low-flying helicopters, the speedway motorcycles toured in the Břevnov cemetery in a terribly loud way, so no speech was heard, it was only formally held by a priest who turned out to be a long-time State Security collaborator, and police cameras, then new Sony camcorders, filmed it from the cemetery walls - the grave is quite near the cemetery wall - so they had quite detailed documentation of the people who were there."

"After that meeting [Jan Patočka with the Dutch Foreign Minister van der Stoel], there was a big mess because the state authorities did not expect it. President Husak refused to meet with Van der Stoel, even though it was planned, and Patočka began to be interrogated. That critical day was March 2 or 3 [1977], when he was picked up early in the morning and interrogated all day until night, returning him home around eleven o'clock. It is true that in the meantime they gave him lunch somewhere in Kladno. They drove him here and there. They did so because the grand opening of the German embassy which that day was given a building it still has today. Previously, they only had the residence of the ambassador, they did not have an embassy, they did not receive it until 1977. And the state and police authorities began to fear that the inconspicuous Patočka could come there and make another mess. So, to make sure that didn't happen, they drove him all day and interrogated him over and over. This made him very tired, and because he was not quite healthy, he collapsed quite badly at home after midnight and they had to take him to the hospital in Strahov, where he was alternately in better and worse condition. He wrote there several short texts on the Charter, one- or two-page proclamations that are quite important and gave the Charter a high moral pathos. And he died on March 13."

"Patočka´s activities were gradually reduced until he finally reached the age of 65 in 1972. He had birthday on June 1, which was also the last lecture of the semester. They did not extend his employment contract and sent him to retire. Even because of that, they adopted a new law that still applies today, and which made such sense that it was possible to retire the professor when it turned out that he was no longer quite sane, but on the contrary, it was normal practice – and it still applies today - that if he is sane, he can easily continue to work in his professorship. However, here it was applied in such a violent way that he simply had to retire. And in this way, at that time, they got rid of a large number of older intellectuals who had stayed there before the occupation and were already very undesirable for normalization."

"In the meantime, I was going to meet Patočka for a consultation from time to time. But then, he was fired from the faculty and I started to feel sorry that I was alone with him, and you also can't write everything down when there are only two of you. So, I said that it might be useful to hold some seminars when the seminars at the faculty were no longer possible, and that I have friends with whom we followed him closely, so I agreed with him that we would all go to his place, and when he saw that we were such a group, so at his suggestion, we decided to systematically read Heidegger's basic and greatest work, Being and Time. And we did that every week."

“Because we immediately realised that Patočka was something extraordinary, so when he began lecturing in autumn 68 as a regular professor, we immediately started taking detailed notes. We created a kind of method where each of us – from a group of five or how many, perhaps more sometimes – we kept writing the sentence he said for as long as we could remember it, regardless of whether he continued speaking or not. Because we hoped that the next one would write another sentence, which he would memorise whole, and that if there were five, six of us, that we cover all of what he said, statistically. And after the lecture, it was always about two hours long, we went for lunch and then set off to Jiří Polívka’s. There the five, six of us went through the notes in detail and formed them into a definitive text. So this was how the first recordings were made, which we later published. And in the meantime I started bringing tape recorders, so then we combined it – the tape with the notes. The tape recorders weren’t anything special, technically. And mainly, back then it would have been unacceptable to stick a microphone on the desk in front of a professor, no one dared do that, and it was quite a distance [from where we sat] in the lecture room, so we combined it with the notes, and we recorded all of his official lectures in this way, and as I said, basically published them as well.”