Jiří Fuchs

"At that time I was still working at Velkolom Jiří. And I approached the union and convinced them to force the management to call the workers together so that Jindra Konečný and I could speak to them. And they said no, that it was not possible, that they had to follow a plan and something. And I convinced the union, and they listened to me. There was a warning strike - for one minute all the machines in the whole open-pit mine Velkolom Jiří were stopped, even the stackers, everything was shut down and no mining was done. Which meant huge money losses. It's very energy intensive just to get a crawler going. It's an enormous amount of energy and consumption to run a big excavator. And yet the unions listened to me. A scaffolding stage was hastily erected in the workshop. A microphone was brought in and the workers assembled, those who wanted to come could come, those who didn't didn't have to. The hall was full, and there Jindra and I spoke to the people and convinced them to support the activities of the Civic Forum in Prague, to not be afraid, to finally fight for our rights now, that a person can say his opinion and that he can travel freely to any country and not be afraid of being arrested for it."

"It [the number of demonstrators in Karlovy Vary] was growing really fast, I was surprised. I didn't expect so many people to be there. On Tuesday it was already a complete crowd. Even after that, we were already doing a demonstration in front of Thermal, there we were already talking from the balcony. It was really spontaneous in Vary, hats off, I didn't expect so many people to support us, and it was really nice. I really like to remember that time and those people and I appreciate them. They had families of their own, they had their own problems, they didn't know where the development was going to go, what direction it was going to go, and yet they weren't afraid and they came there without knowing us. These people, the public, didn't know us. We were only known to a few friends who read the magazine in the evening secretly under the covers, if I'm going to exaggerate, and the next day handed it to another friend with a 'don't lose, return' note, because there weren't enough copies. There weren't many people signing petitions either, the signatures were in the dozens, not hundreds. And then suddenly there was such a crowd. So you can see that there was an ingrained discontent in society. So in the end it bubbled up, as they say."

"I came from Chodov to [Karlovy Vary] and I had a 100-crown note with me on which Klement Gottwald was depicted. And I took the note out in front of the main Post Office, because that's where most people went. So I pulled out the banknote and I addressed the people who were walking around: 'Dear citizens, do you really want this gentleman to be depicted on this banknote?' Until a group of about thirty people formed around me, and I remember the poet Quido Machulka was there. And then Jirka Kotek came, who I met there, and because Jirka Kotek can talk well, these people started to defend me, which was nice because I knew that State Security was after me. I could see them coming from a distance. But these people formed a circle around me and left me in the middle and didn´t let State Security come near me. They sort of blocked it. I needed to buy time so that more and more people could be there. I wanted to take advantage of the situation, that in Prague it was already in full swing, there were already demonstrations in Prague, there were already big riots in Prague, so I thought, time is playing for us, we have to stick together now. And Jirka Kotek, because he had fresh information from Prague, he had just arrived from Prague, he started to address these people, [telling them] what was happening in Prague, and that was actually the impulse for the others, when they heard these words, they formed a bigger crowd. And then it went into the next day. The state security didn't get to me, they were already cautious, they already knew that something was happening, so they withdrew. Later in the evening I called Jindra Konečný from a pay phone, telling him that I was in front of the post office, what had taken place, and Jindra said that he would come to Vary on Monday or Tuesday. Which he did, and since Jindra Konečný was an educated man and could speak very well, he then took the initiative with Jirka Kotek. Then things like the founding of the Civic Forum and all these well-known things happened."

"That was around 1987, but the idea started in 1986. I didn't want the bunch of people I was visiting, the Chodov bunch, to just be drinking alcohol and playing Kryl´s songs in the pub. At the exhibition in Loket that I mentioned, the artist Karel Berger was exhibiting. And he once gave us a painting in the restaurant called Stress. Every time the boys and I had a drink, we'd look at that painting. And when I was looking at that painting and I saw the word Stress underneath it, it connected me with life at that time. I thought to myself, 'We live in stress.' That's where it occurred to me - at that time, of course, we were already reading illegal magazines imported from Prague like Vokno or Pusa magazine or Revolver Revue. And we actually envied those guys from Prague for being able to make such a magazine and for working on it, and we did nothing. So I came up with the idea of using these magazines - because I'm not intellectually educated, I don't have any literary or art school - so I thought, 'I can at most pick out some articles that I like from these magazines, I can copy them and put together some magazine like this for the locals and distribute it to people in the area.' And so I went to Vary with this idea and started looking for people to support it. I wandered all the way to Jindra Konecny in Horní Blatná. And then it was something else, because Jindra Konečný was a doctor of philosophy, who was born in France, he had a clear philosophy, he professed the philosophy of Sartre, and he was well-read, he was surrounded by books, and he was especially enthusiastic about the idea. He himself suggested that he would run the magazine in a more philosophical direction. And of course I agreed to that, and we agreed on that. Of course we met secretly so that nobody would see us. Jindra took the initiative, and then I got practical things, like the frame for printing, the membranes, the printing ink, the place where it would be printed. Then Jindra got that for us, it was in an old abandoned house. So I was in charge of the distribution and printing, and Jindra was in charge of the intellectual, content side."

"[The Vřesová Fuel Combine] was emitting a huge amount of pollutants, and you could see it visually - if you went up a hill, you could see the toxic substances from the chimneys going along the ridge of Krušné hory all the way to Chomutov, where it connected with Litvínov. This was actually a belt of black smoke, an imaginary border between East Germany and Czechoslovakia. And it was visually visible. And it was a terrible smell in Vřesová when they were discharging it. And then they built the Sokolov chemical plant. That was a sweet and sour smell again, a stench. And overall, the air in Sokolov and Karlovy Vary and Cheb was in a devastating state. And I think that was the biggest driving force why I became politically involved at that time. That was the main driver that brought me to it, I wasn't even that interested in politics. I was interested in what I was seeing, what I was experiencing. And that was the lack of freedom in the culture, rock music, how it was suppressed, the long hair, the jeans jacket, the jeans - whoever wore them was an enemy of socialism, and this smog everywhere, and the smell. All of that, I think, influenced our whole group a lot, and it brought us together. Political opinions, nobody listened to that, to Husák, or that anybody was interested in what Ludvík Svoboda was doing before World War II, during World War II and after World War II. At that time nobody was interested in that, because only people in the West had that information anyway. But this, what I was talking about, this was the connecting element of it all."

"At that time, it was before the revolution, I came up with this idea that we weren't going anywhere sitting in a pub somewhere playing Kryl´s songs, I was afraid that we would get stuck there. So I came up with the idea that I would go round to all the people I knew and see if anyone had a picture of a painting at home, any kind of unofficial picture, and that we would do an exhibition. I did that, I put together about eighty or a hundred works of art, and it was through Honza Hadrava from Loket that we organized it downstairs in the amphitheater, which was completely overgrown. There was just a concrete torso of a stage and everywhere there were trees and bushes. The guys and I cut down the trees, we put up the cords, we hung the pictures there. Meanwhile, Honza arranged a concert of the Dog Soldiers Filip and Jáchym Topol, and their father [Josef Topol] came to Loket. I was then picked up by State Security as an organizer and taken to the police station. Meanwhile, the boys packed up the paintings and put them on display in the square where the police station was. They leaned them against cars, against the walls of the buildings, and started chanting 'Release Ředkvička,' because they nicknamed me Ředkvička. So they chanted there, and after four hours they had to let me go, so they let me go. And then we went to the Sokol Hall to see the Dog Soldiers concert and they let us go. Maybe sometime late in the day they somehow shut us out for disturbing the night, but the concert itself went on. It was fine, it was nice."