"I wasn't a well-known person, I was found out after a very long time - they invited me, only here, to the tile house, when almost everybody was already interrogated. The first ones who went there told me that there was somebody called Matura who was interrogating everybody, and they said that Stalin was hanging on the wall, but then they took him away. So I was invited there, and with this Vasek Pavlicek I learned how to react to it. I took the invitation with me, and I discussed with them only the legitimacy of the summons, we never got to it... They kept saying: 'Who gave you the Charter? And you went to Pavel Kohout's by car...?´ ´No, I'm sorry, I don't understand why you summoned me - it's not filled in well... you're investigating a crime, aren't you? Then you have to explain it to me! I can't give you any information.' But (then) I said at one point: 'Oh, you've taken down Stalin!' 'What, you've been here before?'"
"I drove to the border and waited five minutes past midnight - I didn't go within 24 hours - you don't tell me when I'm going to cross the border! I still went there to urinate in the ditch, and it was only five minutes after midnight that I crossed. But the old men who were sitting there, they didn't care... They were ordered to give me a thorough search - they were - but they said, one of them said: 'Oh, it's all sealed! Well, what the hell... we're not going to undo the seals now... what time is it...' There was this one sleeping, the commander, they pulled him out, they had to wake him up, he went to look at it. He was walking around, kicking the tires, saying, "Michelin... and it's all sealed! And what's this?' 'Well, it's a blanket!' And he said, "He's going to Norway, it's cold there... /laughs/ So go!"
"Because I was in a cottage - we had a cottage then, also in Sweden, a small cottage; and there was no TV, I just heard it on the radio. Then I came - I don't know how many days before - to Oslo, and they were sitting in front of the television, and there was this crazy huge demonstration, the demonstration on Letná, how Father Malý made people say the... - 'Our Father? ' The Our Father, they didn't even know how to say it, but he made them do it, and the people were bouncing around like that, because it was cold, and Veronika was laughing so hard that it was like soup when it's boiling!... And then they said, if you're a writer, you have to go there. So I went, well, of course.
They didn't give me a visa, I went to the embassy, and I said, 'Do you know what's going on there? Give me the visa, give me the stamp.You know, Mr Konůpek, Doctor, we haven't received any mail from the Ministry for five days, we don't know what's going on. ´Then it got worse, and then this guy suddenly wanted to save himself, so he said: `Mr. Doctor, come and see what we have here in the archives.´ They had their own private archive there, and he immediately told me who was informing on us, who had volunteered to inform on the emigrants." Also Norwegians?´" "No, it was another Czech emigrant."
Michael Konůpek was born on February 13, 1948 into an outstanding cultural family. His father Jiří Konůpek was a Romanist and a translator from French, one grandfather Jan Konůpek was an artist and the other a philosopher Karel Vorovka. In his youth, Michael devoted himself to athletics, but for health reasons he had to quit. He studied philosophy and sociology, but after school he worked in clerical and technical occupations. In 1968 he married Hana Suk. In January 1977, he signed the Charter and, after the eviction of his wife and two young children, he was intensively involved in dissident life - reproducing and distributing Chartist forms and banned literature, organizing housing concerts and helping distribute the samizdat edition of Kvart. In December 1977 he went to the rest of his family to Norway. In 1981 he co-founded the Fund for the Support of Charter 77 there, of which he became a spokesperson. He was commenting on the Norwegian media about human rights violations in Czechoslovakia, he also smuggled papers into the country and sent journalists there. He co-translated several books into Norwegian, and in 1987 he debuted with the autobiographical novel Böhmerland 600 cc. He returned to Bohemia for the first time in November 1989, he wrote a book on revolutionary events. He lives with his second wife Line With, with whom he has two children, in Oslo and a cottage in Sweden. In addition to his own literary work, he also cares for the cultural footprints of his ancestors, for example, he participated in the radio dramatization of the correspondence of Konůpek’s grandparents and the publication of the philosophical belief of Grandpa Vorovka. Prague is still a magical and important place for him, so far he visited it in autumn 2018 on the occasion of handing over the documentation of the Charter 77 Support Fund to the National Archive.
