Jiří Fišer

[August 21, 1968] ...I remember it clearly for my parents having the silver wedding anniversary that day. My mom was cooking, baking, they had invited their Prague friends to come over - exactly as it is seen in the Czech movie named Pelíšky. Suddenly, I saw my mom and dad running around… the phone rang, someone called in the news. We turned on the radio then, it was not even five in the morning. And for me, it was as if a war just had started. Then, my mom sent me to go to the store to buy that kind of ingredients. To buy five kilograms of sugar, some four. We did not know whether the raids would follow. We used to live here in the Budějovická street. There was an unceasing line of foreign cars leaving for the Austrian borders, disappearing from the Republic, as even they did not know what was going to happen. And Prague was occupied by tanks of the allied forces. Well, everyone was running away, and for me, it was the beginning of the war.

I had a speech at one of the big company meetings. It was in March, let's say, April 1989. A state-owned company law was constituted within the Perestroika framework. Thus, the Regional project organization no longer existed; it was the state-owned company instead. As such, other institutions operated there, such as the general meeting, that was quite a new thing. When all of the employees gather together, and practically anyone can enter the discussion. Nobody ever entered it, though - only the mayor, the comrade director, or the unions had a say. Suddenly, I made an interruption, calling for a challenge. I was trying to play it this way: 'I see so many intelligent people over here, let's make things slightly different, let's prefer expertise, and let's approach things differently but via the system of cadres. It caused kind of a razzle-dazzle. At the very first moment, a line of shots had landed on my desk. But I caught some infection then and spent a week in fever. When I returned to work, everyone there was like as if trying to avoid me. They started looking into it - what was that, how did it happen, if I had it prepared or not. They even sent someone from the ÚV KSČ (Central Committee of the Communist Paty of Czechoslovakia) to check on me while I was still sick, and things like that. I was scared a bit, not much, though, as it seemed absurd to me.