Zdeněk Hejduk

"I was living in Velim at the time, I was married, and we were building a cooperative housing project here [in Kolín]. That meant you joined a cooperative, which provided the funding, and we worked on the construction ourselves. I spent five years building an apartment—we built 42 apartments and had only one professional bricklayer. It wasn’t anything planned for the 17th [of November], but someone came—or somehow we heard—that Punc was playing at Kaňk. My wife and I hadn’t seen them in ages, so we thought, ‘Let’s go.’ By then, we had kids, so their grandmother probably took care of them. We went to catch the train in Kolín, but it was delayed or something happened—it just wasn’t running. So we said, ‘Let’s try hitchhiking.’ A guy picked us up and said, ‘I’m coming from Prague. There’s a demonstration going on—officially permitted—but people are carrying some interesting slogans. Something’s shuffeling around there. Maybe something will happen.’ Or maybe he didn’t say something would happen, just that the atmosphere was tense, and it was interesting. Then we got going. Of course, TV wasn’t showing much about it. I remember—I even kept the newspapers at home for a while—that the only paper reporting on it somewhat openly was Svobodné slovo. So every morning, we would line up for it. Since I commuted from Velim to work, my first stop was always the newsstand, eagerly reading to find out what was going on."