Ing. Petr Hájek

"The Jablonec Civic Forum was founded in our kitchen - we only had one other room, this living room/bedroom - and then it moved to the town theatre. That happened with the help of Liberec colleagues who... I had contacts, and then more well-meaning people joined us when the theatre opened and there were more people coming. Prague actors would speak on stage and the theatre was always full. There were a lot of people there. I was never sitting on stage, nor was I in the audience. I was either somewhere behind the curtain, off to the side on the apron or peering from the back into the audience, because I needed to go to Prague again. It was really very hectic on my part to be driving around like that all the time. I remember this perfectly. Recently, without knowing that I would be talking to you like this, I remembered with a friend a situation where the representatives of the Jablonec Civic Forum were sitting there on the stage. The auditorium was full of people, and we asked: Who else would like to work in some of those committees, who would like to do something? This was not during the early days of the revolution; this already a little bit further, a week or a fortnight in. Now we saw some die-hard communists climbing the little these steps placed next to the box. We knew they were StB officers, bastards, and they were applying. I understood at that very moment that my place was probably not in politics. I just wasn't and still am not capable of being a politician and talking or dealing with people of that kind, as I said a moment ago."

"I didn't understand it but there was an anti-communist atmosphere in our home. My father used to swear at them a lot. Every time there was an ice hockey World Cup and we played the Russians, we had big fan nights at home. In '68, my grandmother's sister was with us; she was the sister of my mother's mother, so she was effectively my great-aunt. I came into the kitchen in the morning and both of these women who had lived through both World War I and World War II were crying, thinking there was a war. Being eight years old, I had no idea what was going on and what it meant. We went into town. Jablonec was lucky compared to Liberec in that the invasion troops didn't arrive there. There were no tanks, no armoured personnel carriers, no shooting as far as I know. We went downtown along Palacký Avenue, as I was saying a moment ago, and up to the Upper Square. It's called the Upper Square but before that it was Red Army Square, and to this day it's still called 'Ruďák'. We went to Ruďák; there was a supermarket there and there were crazy queues. And the two old ladies, in their seventies and having experienced two wars previously, immediately got in line there. The shop's main entrance was closed and they were giving out goods like it was rations - flour, butter, bread - from the back door. I didn't understand why it was like that, I think they were afraid of looting, so the shopkeeper - even though it was a state-owned shop, maybe Pramen, I don't know - regulated the situation somewhat. Then we went from the Upper Square or Ruďák to to the square that's in the middle, that was actually Náměstí míru (Peace Square). There was a big gathering of the people there, various speakers, and some petitions were signed. Now since ours is and has been a jewellery town, the jewellery merchants immediately started selling flags made of beads. I remember they gave out tricolors and these bead flags."