Jiří Fiedor

“The first year was with no troubles at all. That happened to be a year when lots of the long-haired ones finished up. Only a few of remained there and suddenly they started making demands and threats, that we have to cut our hair and that if we don’t, they’ll expel us, and so on. So they actually expelled me from the boarding house first because I refused to have my hair cut, because they got a new manager there who had managed a police boarding house before. So he was used to seeing everyone with short hair. Then the pressure upped at school too, where the deputy headmistress told me that I wasn’t to attend her lessons until I cut my hair short. So I didn’t attend her lessons, because I didn’t cut my hair. It ended up with my parents coming and trying to persuade me, together with the headmaster, to have my hair cut and stay at the school. I was obstinate and refused to have my hair cut, and back then I discovered the recordings of the Plastic People and the third festival of the second culture and the theoretical texts of Ivan Jirous, and I was already influenced by the Czech underground a bit. So I actually, how did Loony [Ivan Jirous - trans.] say it – ‘stick your education up your arse’, so with this motto on mind I quit the school. The way it happened was they said that if I leave of my own accord they wouldn’t expel me and I won’t have further trouble. So my mum, I wasn’t of age yet, so my mum signed it for me that I had decided to leave.”

“It was pretty clear to me and I didn’t hesitate for a moment. I wanted to sign it individually some time earlier and I told the boys, the friends that I visited the Šavrdas with, that I was already decided, that I’d sign it. They said wait a bit, we’ll all sign it, we want to sign it too, the boys from Opava, someone from Ostrava, and Lubomír Salzmann from Havířov. So my impression is that we signed it together in December 1988 or something like that. It was in connection to the fact that Tomáš Hradílek was to be spokesman and that we’d give it to him then, when we signed it. So that’s how it actually happened that we signed it towards the end of 1988 and handed it over to Tomáš. I know I already wanted to sign it in September, some time earlier. Back then you didn’t think about whether to sign it sooner or later. The idea of the regime failing, to quickly sign it while I could, it didn’t work like that of course. And also I was twenty-three years old at the time. So when you’re young, strong, radical, you don’t think about what ifs.”