Master of Fine Arts Jiří Hrdina

“After 1948 there were people who decided to make money from changing conditions. In Ostrava there was a certain chimney apprentice Pěnička who expropriated the Ostrava photographic studios. He did it in such a way that there was a lot of his property left at his home. In the following thirty years, he sold all the things he had stolen at the Photographers' Meetings.”

“The Poles from the border areas towards Rybnik and Katowice came here to work. At that time, Poland was industrially poorer in terms of what could be bought there. One of the scarce items was building materials. Many Polish workers were working at the Vítkovice building materials. There were leaders who were in charge of all this, not working and benefiting from it. The buses that were returning across the strictly guarded border were packed with wall tiles, bathtubs, and cement bags. Customs officers always looked at them, got what they were supposed to get, and the building materials were transported freely back and forth.”

“Sometime after November 17, I was multiplying something in the room where we did it, and on that occasion, I accidentally picked up some strange papers there. When I later look into them, I found out that it was a proclamation that someone made in Vítkovice buildings. Apparently, it was someone from the party committee. They stated that we were asking for the hardest possible procedure with the deployment of the People's Militia, peace for work and other similar things. It happened even before the general strike, but the first relatively objective responses had already started to be published in the People's Democracy. It was then published by the Czechoslovak People's Party, and so there appeared articles of a slightly different meaning than those published in Rudé Právo (Red Truth). So, I decided to call them directly from work and to send them. It was probably the first time I experienced tapping phones. One had heard of it before, but it never occurred that it was actually happening to him. It didn't even take two hours, and there were guys with badges from the State Security. They investigated the whole thing and wanted to know how it happened, and so on.”