“When I started attending the third grade of elementary school, we moved to Ďáblice, which was literally in the middle of nowhere. There were four homesteads which they had obviously confiscated from farmers and they turned them into the State Farm Prague. There was no sewage system, there was no running water. There was the village Ďáblice and there was nothing there. We lived over there on the opposite side, that’s where the first building from prefabricated blocks in this country was built. One-floor building. My parents were given a flat there. Living there was crazy. It was the first experimental prefab building, and you can thus imagine what it looked like. Water was leaking in there, there was no insulation, water was not running properly, because there was bad water pressure...”
“My father was born in 1912. Imagine that, he studied together with Gustáv Husák. In 1936 they established a communist cell at the Law Faculty, and my dad and Husák were obviously seeing each other there. My father was not much of a talker, but from time to time he would mention some of his memories. He remembered that in 1936 Husák told them: ‘One day I will be the president of this republic.’ They all laughed at him... If you consider what Europe looked like at that time - Hitler, Mussolini, Franco...”
“The normalization period under Husák, that was something terrible. That’s why I welcomed Charter 77, because something finally started happening. As soon as the article ‘Losers and usurpers’ appeared in the Rudé Právo newspaper, it started. The Anti-Charter, and so on. I immediately went to see Rychetský and I told him that I would sign Charter 77 as well. We both signed it – my wife and I . But Rychetský convinced us to withdraw the signature of my wife, because we had two children. If they imprisoned us, at least one of us would be able to stay with the children. They were still little. Our son was one year old and our daughter has not yet turned six.”
Jindřich Dohnal was born on May 2, 1946 in Prague. His mother studied at a trade academy in České Budějovice, where she also met his father, Jindřich Dohnal Sr., for the first time. He came from a poor family of a railway block post operator, he joined the Communist Party in 1932 and he graduated from the Law faculty of Charles University before the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1960 he became the main arbiter of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. The views of Jindřich Dohnal Jr. were not influenced by the career of his father, nevertheless, his father’s professional life certainly helped him when trying to enrol in a university. Jindřich formed his own political opinions by himself, through meeting with people whose lives had been negatively impacted by the Communist Party. His father was expelled from the Party in 1968 and Jindřich Jr. did not get an official passport as a result thereof, which prevented him from being able to do his job properly. In 1977 he signed Charter 77 and he started to be active in the dissent movement. During eleven years, his wife Táňa copied over 60 blacklisted books for the samizdat edition Popelnice (“Dustbin”) which was established and led by Jiří Gruntorád.
