Romana Křenková

“Then there was a fabulous week, weekend, or several days, on the occasion of the anniversary of the occupation - in eighty-nine, those were massive demonstrations in Wenceslaus Square and all over Prague. And at the Faculty of Arts and what is now Jan Palach Square, for instance. Those were grand days. Things were really picking up speed by then, so we took part in the demonstrations. They had the water cannons there, and it was great fun when it hit you, it smashed into you really hard, but at the same time it filled you with adrenaline. Those were really nice days. And I met all kinds of people there - like Professor Hájek. He was running along there in his caftan, running, and he was quite an old man. It was lovely... I could feel, and my friends, those I spoke with about this kind of thing - even in Řempo - we all felt that something was happening, that it was an unstoppable process.”

“I sent him [Charter 77] while he was in the army, and the consequences were that they started going after him. Basically, the situation developed into them persecuting him for giving people the Bible and reading from the Bible, and that he got the Charter there and was passing it on and reading from it, well, and they started going after him for inciting revolt in the army. In the end the public prosecutor filed charges against him, and there was a trial in Příbram, where they sentenced him to eighteen months of prison, unsuspended, for the crime of incitement to revolt.”

“They persecuted us for incitement to revolt at first. It began while we were still living in the parish house, where we behaved... My husband decided - after there had been no water in the village for a week - that he will go and wash himself in the house of the chairman of the national committee [something like the village mayor - trans.], who did have water. Well, but of course that was an act worthy of a revolution. So he went to have a wash, he put one foot into [the chairman’s] flat, which was presented as a violation of home privacy, and then he lost his permission to provide spiritual care, and it all went downhill from there.”

“Unlike people who were afraid of the Charter, I - why am I taking so long to say this - because for me, [the decision to sign Charter 77 - ed.] was no act of bravery, but deliverance, existential deliverance. I needed to be with someone, to be in a group with someone. I was alone for so terribly long, for everything. I needed to at least be part of something, with the Charter. Why not? I liked the ideas behind the Charter, so I really wanted to sign it. But fate took me down a different path.”

“Right after the revolution one friend told me: ‘Look, a friend of mine is a minister, would you like to be his chief of office?’ So I took the post of chief of office for one minister, and I was full of revolutionary zeal and enthusiasm, and those beginnings were amazing. But to be honest, in time I came to understand that the functions that had previously been held by various Communist leaders and people who had been very close to the previous regime, [these people] started switching over to new functions, new positions. So I was gradually burdened with a deepening feeling of disappointment. I don’t know how you see matters today, but I am dismayed by many things. But I have come to the conclusion that it is not so much political dismay, but rather I have realised that this is kind of how the human soul works.”