Jaroslav Havlík

"After six months they started visiting me, doing house searches, threatening and harassing me, every time there was something happening they would come. Among us, I must say, there was a kind of informer or what to call him, a police informer, because they knew exactly what was going on there. And I got scared. And I was scared more and more, I had ‘my’ officer, I can't remember his name now - it's in the files - who quite unpleasantly... They didn't beat me, but they interrogated me quite unpleasantly. I was always taken from the cemetery, driven to Jindřichův Hradec, and there I was interrogated. And then they kicked me out, and I had to walk across the whole town. And it was unpleasant. And then, I was just scared. Anyway, at that time it was enough to have long hair and beard, which I had, and the situation was already so tense in normalization, that you could just be walking down the street and immediately a police car which was passing by, or a patrol car, would turn around, a check, harassment - you don't have the same long hair on your ID as you really do - [you got] a fine and so on. And you had to be good and obey, because the moment you said something, they would pick you up. So anyway, although I liked the cemetery, the cemetery started to flourish because my friends had started to help me, we uncovered all the tombstones, we refined the whole beautiful fourteenth or fifteenth century cemetery. But the harassment was getting worse and I decided that, although I hadn´t wanted to for a long time, I would try to escape too."

"To go back to that day. At that time I was passing through or walking along Italská Street, above the [Czechoslovak] Radio, and I could already see part of a barricade made of buses and trams. And [I could see] tanks going there and trying to break through it. And I had a rather cruel experience from those side streets near Italská Street, on our side. Namely, the tanks were already breaking through the barricade, and a man came from the side street with a huge Tatra, a truck, and people were persuading him to let the truck go, towards the barricade, and somehow prevent it [the breakage] from happening. He was making a decision for a while, I can still see it lively, then he got into the car, started it up and jumped out. But unfortunately there was a man at the barricade and the car ran over him. Which was awful. Then it got worse because the Russians started shooting, some of the tanks caught fire, started shooting and that's when we got scared and we were running home. I'll never forget that for the rest of my life, I have that image still in front of my eyes and I have to say - not only because of that - I really don't like the Russians."