Vlasta Kuboušková

"There was no internet. Yet the jokes got out very quickly. They were either new jokes or jokes from the time of the occupation, they were just innovated for the time of normalisation. It's a folk thing, nobody knows who invented it. They talked about it at work, people had a lot of cottages at that time. Then they went from the big cities to the cottages in the regions, went to the pub and said it there too. Pubs are where everything comes together. Even without the internet, those jokes got out to people. And I think it brought them together. Because we didn't agree with it, we at least made fun of it."

"That's when information started to appear about what was happening in the 1950s, that there were political trials, that there were executions. Society began to loosen up. There was no censorship, so things came to light, we learned different things. We liked that time very much because the relaxation was not only in censorship, but also in culture. We saw beautiful foreign films, foreign music was played, for example on the radio, which was not the case before. Our singers - the Golden Kids, Kubišová, Neckář, Vondráčková - had nice projects, nice songs. And literature. They started publishing books that couldn't be published before. We used to talk about it at school, especially in the first year. We'd come to school and we'd talk about what we'd seen in the cinema. I remember things like Kladivo na čarodějnice, I was so scared of that, I remember exactly where I was sitting in that cinema. Middle right. And I didn't see much of that movie - weak temper."