Ing. Jan Kaňák

"Sometime at the end of August, about the 25th [of 1977], senior doctor Kos called me in and said, 'Honza, we're having a Communist public meeting next week, so all the staff will be there. And I'm telling you ahead of time...' It was going to be sometime on the second of September, maybe. '... And I'm telling you ahead of time that you're going to be nominated as the Communist Party candidate there.' And I said, 'Well, dude...' And he said, 'Well, good for you, this, this is hard to turn down. That's the kind of thing when they tell you in front of the whole forum and you'd say: No, thank you, I don't want to, you're done. That's why I'm telling you a week in advance, so deal with it. think of another solution if you don't want to do it.' And imagine that the next day... I was obviously head over heels, unhappy... I was like, 'What am I going to do? I can't go in there...' And the next day my doctor called me in and said, 'Look, the [blood] results came back and apparently you have to leave immediately, from the X-ray for sure. You can go and work as a helper or in the kitchen, but you're not allowed to work on the X-ray.' I said, 'Well, you know what I'm terrified of? They're going to nominate me as the party candidate!' And the doctor, Dr. Zanda, who was also there as a punishment in that Janov, said to me, 'Well, then screw it... and go.'"

"As far as my mother is concerned, she grew up in a typical social-democratic family in Pilsen, [so] of course she had a problem with it [the onset of the communist regime]. But my father, as he was such a rebel, I would say, was somehow attracted to that ideology. So he - I'm not sure exactly when it was, maybe in the year forty-nine - joined the party. I would say it was also his adventurous nature... This fling of his didn't last long, because then in '53 came the currency, the storm at Skoda, [when] my grandmother lost her money, my other grandmother lost her money, which was basically the family savings. So he started to get very stressed. I think the counter-revolution in Hungary in the '60s didn't help him either, so by the '60s, which I remember, he was in big trouble. And he also had problems with those superiors who more or less gave him party tasks. If he didn't want to do something, he said it was bullshit. So it was already a period when he was in great conflict both with his superiors and with those, I would say, political bigwigs. Of course, the biggest transition for him was the sixties, a kind of a relaxation that came in, a kind of a boom in terms of culture and so on. And when the Stalinist era ended, things started to come out that had been just a kind of a rumor before. And suddenly one began to see what was actually happening not only in the 1940s and 1950s in Russia, in our country and everywhere else..."