Pavel Dudr

“What couldn’t be got, people procured in any way possible. So people built themselves houses, cottages, they constructed caravans, trailers. You could do a lot of things yourself, so we reckoned we’d publish magazines and books. Because books weren’t available, and lots of writers were on the index [of prohibited authors], and their books weren’t even published, so they were copied out in various ways.”

“I printed [the magazines] in the cellar; we had several cellars and I had one of the cellars as a workshop. I did it there, and it was fine until the house inspection came, they cleaned me out then. In the end they took me to the remand prison in Brno.”

“I personally wasn’t some kind of dissident who would declare his opinions somewhere, that’s what the Charter spokesmen were for, they made the announcements for the press, they said their opinions out loud and were sent to prison for any number of years because of it. But I never talked about my opinions except with friends, but that was always an closed group. It was so closed, that when someone else came, someone we didn’t know, everyone immediately watched their mouth.”

“I wasn’t some kind of dissident. I just reckoned... What they were trying to do here with the dissidents, that was a handful of people, was to isolate them from the rest. I reckoned that it’s bad, that it’s necessary to keep in touch both with dissidents and with people. So I was in touch with them, but I didn’t do anything publicly. I wasn’t even interested in that, because if you wanted to copy things, you couldn’t be well known because they snatched the well-known people up straight away. You couldn’t copy literature if you were well known.”