Marcel Hájek

“I appointed myself head of the strike committee, by self-appointment. I stood up in front of the students and said we were establishing a strike committee and that I was its chief. No one debated it. But they already knew me quite well, and Zindr too. Together we established the strike committee, we took over the keys of the faculty [the FMCU in Pilsen - ed.]. At the time it was made possible by the dean, who was extremely polite and said that we had the right to decide our own future and that it was up to us. So the occupation strike began at the Faculty of Medicine, and then other schools joined in - technology, back then the Faculty of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, and finally the Faculty of Education, because that was strongly Bolshevik, deep red. Its dean, Brychta, was a proper crook, he wanted heads to start rolling, to expel students right as it was happening. We were glad that we experienced the revolution here, that we were part of it, that we weren’t somewhere abroad or coming from outside. Suddenly it was great. We travelled to Prague overnight. Say three times a night we were in Prague at the main strike committee and then back again. We took materials, printed [leaflets - ed.]. We got typewriters from all of the departments, everyone sat in one lecture room in Pavlov Institute and everyone copied out documents there. Down in the lobby people painted posters and plastered them all over Pilsen. The atmosphere was incredible. We felt joyful as we carried things along all the way to the general strike on 27 November [1989].”

“I didn’t copy anything out, I never was good at typewriting. But I tried to distribute samizdat literature. When someone wrote it out, I tried to get to where it needed to be. One time I distributed materials for the Jazz Section like that. A certain person, whom I knew and who knew me, brought me a stack of material from Prague, and I distributed it around Pilsen. You couldn’t send it by post. People knew me by then, they knew I was bringing them [literature - ed.]. It wasn’t just Jazz Section stuff, there were Infochs - Information on the Charter, or Vokno and Voknoviny by Franta ‘Porky’ Stárek. Then some events by the Jazz Section and the Jazz Section news. Everything was distributed like that. There were always people who distributed it, you gave them a stack, and they took it to other people.”

“There was a concert of several bands in Služetín. Služetín is in Tachov District; it was a farm belonging to the dissident [Daniel] Mráz. [The event - ed.] took place in his barn. We have photos of it. We arrived there. We had a friend who had an old, rounded bus, which was used to transport the bands’ speakers. So we pitted in [for the travel costs - ed.], and he took about fifteen of us there and then back again. That’s how people gathered there. Several different bands performed there - Ženy, Suřík, Křížalovský fošna. The bands finished up, we left, and about half an hour later the cops trawled the place. We escaped that, we left in time. But the NSC [National Security Corps, the police - trans.] came in the dark and nabbed the people who stayed there.”