Jan Kavan

"We then concentrated on a media political campaign abroad. We approached journalists, subscribers to Palach Press, governments, arguing rightly that people who had not violated international law were being persecuted. That they had not violated the Helsinki Pact, which legalized the exchange of information by all means, including printed information, that they had not committed any crime acknowledged in the West. That it is persecution of people who have a different political opinion because they want to get information that is not in the Czechoslovak media world. We had a lot of support in France because two of their citizens were arrested. We were supported there not only by the government and the big newspapers, but also by the big trade unions, we managed to do huge demonstrations there, the publicity was great. Less in England, but still the media campaign in England was considerable, in Austria it was big. Husák was trying to visit Austria at that time, and we took advantage of that. We concentrated on mobilising all our friends from journalists to politicians to academics to protest against the imprisonment of these people. We had support from President Francois Mitterrand, the Austrian Chancellor, the British government didn't help us much, but others did. I think the campaign contributed to the fact that they didn't turn the arrests into the big trial they were planning. First there was going to be [the trial] with Jiřina Šiklová and associates and Jan Ruml and associates. But the trial never happened and after a year they were released without trial, some of them two months later."

"Earlier, when Petr Pithart arranged it, we smuggled a film with a recording of the proceedings of the 14th Congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, the illegal congress. I managed to give a short shot of it to British television, but huge reels of great material, before I could store it, I left them in the car overnight. That was parked outside my house. The next morning when I went to get it, the boot was broken into and the films had been stolen. I offered a reward in the neighbourhood if someone returned it. I thought it was stolen by an English thief who thought, God knows what it would be. I was sure it was unintelligible Czech chatter to him, but no one contacted me. I don't think it was any thief, I think it was an action of State Security, which sometimes followed me in England. That also took up a lot of space, because we exported a lot of those films, especially after Charter 77 was established. At first it was 8 or 16mm films, then videotapes as the [technologies] developed. We used to send cameras and film material to Prague for interviews with Charter 77 spokesmen. For example, we filmed the surveillance of Václav Havel from that little house on chicken legs in Trutnov, or we managed to film the surveillance of Jiří and Franta Kriegel, which was fantastic. They met, and each of them was being followed by State Security members. Then on the film you could see not only Hájek and Kriegel, but also how the groups that had been following them joined together, both on foot and in cars."

Before his trips to Prague he disguised himself with a wig and contact lenses "On that first trip, I can look at my passport, I didn't change my appearance much. I grew a beard before the first trip, but I don't remember much about it. Then when I went to Prague in 1987, for the first time after my mother and grandmother had died, that's when I started changing my appearance a lot. That's when I got contact lenses instead of glasses, a wig that the barber made from my hair. I looked different from the photos State Security might have had. They didn't find out my identity according to the information I got after 1989." - "You said you were a little nervous about only going out at night during your first visit?" - "I was nervous during the first visit in August 1970, it was the first time I had done anything like that. I had no idea how dangerous it was, but I was concerned. Even, I didn't check this, but it's highly probable, one day after two or three days, when I was fed up with spending so much time in the hotel, I, I think it was a meeting with Peter Pithart, I went to it. And on the street I saw a frightened, amazed look on the face of a guy in whom I recognized a university communist functionary, whose name was Ondrouch. He was looking as if he had seen a ghost, so I was afraid that he recognized me, it was at a distance, he didn't approach, he just looked at me. I walked away, I'm not saying it scared me, but I was very worried afterwards and my movement on the streets was greatly reduced during the day. And then, and Petr Pithart urged me to do so, I went back as soon as possible."

"The United States, it was pure chance. We got an invitation to the Union of University Students (SVS) to go to the USA in the summer of 1968 to a student youth conference in Kansas City. Nobody wanted to go. The summer of 1968 was the most interesting period in the history of Czechoslovakia, at least from my point of view. I suggested that the main representatives of SVS, Jirka Müller and Luboš Holeček, should go there, but their argument against it was justified, because they were active daily in the Prague Spring and did not speak English. It was up to me or Karel Kovanda, I don't know why Karel refused. The pressure was on me to go, I went without any enthusiasm. In order to make the air ticket as cheap as possible, SVS paid for it and they bought me a twenty-one day ticket. I don't know, what else do you want to know? In America, I spoke at that conference, I described the situation of the Prague Spring, I defended the ideas of the Prague Spring and the ideas of the student and youth position within the Prague Spring. I had no idea that in two days there would be an invasion [of Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia]. Then I made as speech again, I strongly condemned the invasion, the journalists descended on me, so I spoke, I was on the radio and in the newspapers. Among other things, the editor of a weekly newspaper came, it was published in San Francisco, it was called 'Rampac', I have forgotten the editor's name. He offered me to write an article describing the whole genesis of the student resistance up to the invasion, and the arguments so that the Americans would understand why the invasion took place and what our position was. In exchange for the article, he paid for my plane ticket back to Prague so that I could get there early and not have to wait more days. The offer seemed interesting and profitable and I accepted. The very next day I flew with him to California, where I spent several days writing the article. There I saw nothing but the editorial office and his flat."

"We had to split it up after a while. Cyclostyled copies and books, just bigger things, were going home in camper vans. And when something was being driven out, there was more and more of it. First of all, samizdat books, I think, and films, we took out a whole [filmed] flat theatre with Mrs Chramostová, who played [Lady] Macbeth. We also took out the film footage of the XIVth Congress, the Vysočany communist congress, or the background material for the Nobel Prize for Jaroslav Seifert. All of this used to go in cars, whereas the letters with information that I sent to Jiřina Šiklová, Jirka Müller, Petr Pithart were carried by couriers. Or they sent me some sensitive documents, it didn't go by car. They were carried by couriers, they usually had it taped to their bodies, so we made differencies. For smuggling bigger things we used camper vans, every two or three years we changed the van. From trip to trip, but [we also changed] license plates and insurance papers. We changed number plates and green [insurance] cards, which was done by Michael Randall, who could print illegal green cards at Bradford University. But we only used them on the Czechoslovak-Austrian border. As soon as the cars left the Czech Republic, they [false papers] were destroyed and they continued to drive on real insurance papers. Every two or three years we didn't just change the plates, we bought a new car. We started with a Volkswagen, then we had a Ford Transit. Later, when it got huge, we hauled tons of material back and forth. We added a French Peugeot, driven by French Trotskyists, and then that was big." - "One last comment. You said - until 1981. But the camper vans ran until November 1989, with a small break after Jiřina Šiklová was arrested." - "After her arrest, we didn't know how much they knew, and I had to rebuild and find another system of hiding spaces. Because in that French Peugeot that they caught in April 1981, they found out, of course, how the system worked there. So that system, we couldn't use that anymore. Then we used to drive in a big Austin Maxi station wagon, but it was smaller than a camper and the quantity was smaller. We gradually increased that until 1989. So it was discontinued for three quarters of a year at the most after Jiřka Šiklová and the others were arrested."

"When we arrived in Czechoslovakia, my mother wanted to learn Czech and understand what the struggle for socialism, which her father had convinced her of, was all about. So she volunteered to work in a factory, working as a lathe operator at Tatra Vagónka, where she suddenly discovered that the Czech working class was somewhat different from what my father had been telling her about. She worked there for a while, and it didn't bring her closer to the Czech working class. But she made a lot of friends there who helped her. Ironically, when she was fired, she saw an advert and applied for a job as a draughtswoman at the Ministry of Transport, and there was a kind of department that dealt with the electrification of the Czechoslovak State Railways. She didn't understand it at all, but she needed any kind of job because she was without income. She described that they gave her a board and told her, 'Make a line. You have a steady hand, you can draw, we will teach you the rest.' She worked there for several years before her superiors in the personnel department found out that she was the wife of a traitor, and from imperialist England on top of that. So they fired her, then she was out of work for a long time."

"He told me only briefly about the war, because I was still very young and I couldn't put everything together. And secondly, much of the narration was overshadowed by the memory of his mother, cousins and other relatives who had been arrested in Czechoslovakia and taken to Auschwitz via Terezín, where his mother and the others perished. My father was very brief and reluctant to talk about it, it was obvious that he did not want to talk about it much. Regardless of this shadow, he occasionally talked about his experiences in the war. He had the reputation of being a not very skilful and not very disciplined soldier, on the other hand very brave one. Twice, I think, he was awarded the Medal of Valor, including for Dunkirk. Once, I think he suggested that partly through his fault as a commanding officer, his unit got encircled; on the other hand, they fought their way out of the encirclement. He had more stories like that, but we had to pull them out of him. He didn't like to talk about it, I don't remember him talking in any detail or willingly about those war experiences."

"That the volume complicated my life for many years, that's for sure. I have read the volume, actually the volumes, one is '69, one is '70, so I have read it only once, or leafed through it when we were allowed to do so as MPs. I didn't, of course, get a copy of it to read it carefully, let alone to take it away, but basically I haven't read it that thoroughly. I relied more on Petr Uhl's analysis, he read it extremely carefully, he informed me of a number of documents in the file, documents that were in the file. So did the then Minister of the Interior, Honza Ruml, with whose permission Petr was reading the file. So I don't know the file in such detail, I don't remember what documents were included in it. I took it as a State Security file, so why should I restore the details from a file written by people from the other side of the barricade. I didn't take it that seriously. I was defending one thing in particular, that is, the suspicion that I had consciously collaborated with State Security, that was important to me. Nothing else was important, everything else was disinformation, speculation, I wasn't that interested. I agreed with Petr that everything else would be to legitimize the State Security materials, I had no great interest in that. I was interested in it going to court, I sued for it too, so that it could go to court, so that they could hear my witnesses, so that they could recognize that I was not cooperating. Everything else was completely marginal."

"So Luboš Holeček, Karel Kovanda, myself, and Petr Pithart, an assistant from the law school, met there and wrote a statement on behalf of the Prague students [a statement on Jan Palach's death], which the chairman of the Union of University Students (SVS), who was not present when the statement was being formulated, then read on television. And I read it on the radio. In the meantime, we were invited to the leadership office in Strakovka, or where the meeting was, I don't remember. The meeting was organised by the Czech Prime Minister, he negotiated with us to stop the demonstration we were preparing in Prague. We read him a draft of our declaration, which he grossly disliked. Into this came a message, a message came first to the government side of the table and then ten minutes later a message from the SVS to us that Palach had died. We understood that something like this had happened when the Czech Prime Minister Rázl flared up in anger that Palach had shuffled the cards like that. But in fact it accelerated the negotiations, it led to an acceptable compromise of our formulations, which had been extremely radical. He, Rázl, knew that it couldn't stop it, the informal demonstrations were already taking place, he knew that our formal ones would come. He allowed me to appear on the radio and Dymáček on television with a statement that was published in the press, so it is available."

"A representative of the Bertrand Russell Foundation came from England, I think his name was Showman, he invited us to a peace conference in Stockholm, the Union of University Students (SVS)delegated Luboš Holeček and me. I was preparing for it, Luboš was smarter, he took only some accessories in his suitcase, a toothbrush and almost nothing else. I had a number of documents with me, some I hadn't even read. There were a number of party documents and documents attacking us students, also a lot of SVS documentation, which they found during the search, they found everything at Ruzyně and confiscated it. The next day there was an interrogation at State Security in Bartolomějská, and it was the end of the summer of 1969. Then I was just interested in finding out if there was any chance of getting a passport and studying at Oxford, where I was still enrolled as a student of the second semester with suspended study. I don't remember much about the interrogations, I was used to them, they weren't threatening, they didn't leave an impression on me to this day. I was there a few times, I can't think of anything significant, then Mr Patejdl contacted me. He dealt with me on behalf of, I don't even remember who, but he was obviously a State Security member. He tried to persuade me that he would be able to put in a good word for me so that I could get my passport back and go to Oxford. I had the persistent impression, as I conveyed it to my fellow students, that he was suggesting that in exchange for his helpfulness I might get my passport. But that he would directly ask me, no, he didn´t. I met with him about three times."