Barbara Day

„Well, the French organisation was particularly important, it had been started by Catherine Audard who was the partner of one of the British founders of the Jan Hus foundation, Alan Montefiore. And she... Like Alan Montefiore, she is a philosopher, still working, still teaching, and she had a lot of French contacts whom she had activated to start something similar to the British. And the were really very competitive, they were almost quite indignant that the British had thought of this first and quickly started their own organisation, which was to some respect more political than ours. The British Jan Hus Foundation was always, as far as it could be, politically neutral. Its attitude towards communism was that it wasn´t... that it was independent, that it was providing independent education, not an anti-communist education. And that was quite a distinctive feature of its work. And according to the British spectrum, it went from Left to Right. Jessica and Roger were more to the Right-wing, but we had other trustees Bill Newton-Smith, Alan Montefiore, Paul Flather, who were more to the Left-wing.“ - „And the French were different?“ - „The French were more active politically. And more left-wing. Somewhere in the chronicles there is a story of... I think he must had been French lecturer, who went to one of the underground seminars and lectured on Marxism. And that was not very popular, not very well received.“

„Well, they musn´t write anything down. So they had... Or they musn´t write anything explicit down. If they wanted to remember addresses or people´s names, this had to be somehow... They had to find a way of memorising them or coding them. So that hey knew what to do when they got there and didn´t have to ask anyone where to go or what to do. If they were... if their belongings were searched, it wouldn´t betray names on anyone in Prague or in Brno. Then when they got there, we tried to explain to them in very lot of detail if they hadn´t been before, in a lot of detail, how they should find the house or flat they were going to. And how they should get there. Who they would probably find there. That we would give them the name of the person to whom they could talk most openly. And advise them that at the seminar they simply gave their lecture and talk about philosophy but didn´t talk about things that were peticular to the Foundation.“