Mgr. Karel Lippmann

"This is how we understood it, because we saw the reasons around us. There were such horrible things happening, like the students who were very active during the strike suddenly started to accept the situation officially. The Lenin Youth Union was founded later after Palach's deed, though Palach had already seen the germs. Suddenly, the most revolutionary speakers became chairs of the Lenin Youth Union. I recall we beat one of them up in the dormitory. We put a blanket on him and beat him up. They claimed it was better for the 'good guys' (i.e. them) to chair the Lenin Youth Union because the 'bad guys' weren't involved. It was such a strange excuse for what they did. I witnessed this excuse a few times. And Palach likely perceived this far more sensitively than any of us did at the time."

"This was a typical manifestation of the normalization I guess, and we witnessed it then. When we first started, there weren't many of us. Most people joined in after Christmas. When I came to a meeting then, I was amazed by how many people were there. By then, it was clear how it was going to turn out, but before that... So at first, for maybe a week, I was still worried they could come and arrest me. Then I stopped worrying too because I saw the general strike, the Letná protests, and they were already negotiating with Havel and so on... so I saw it wasn't going to get me to prison. But in those first days, it wasn't so obvious and there weren't that many of us. Then, when we met again, there were a lot more of us."

"And after the shock, there was a huge protest in Prague where not only students - ordinary citizens joined us as well - marched through the entire downtown Prague in a kind of mourning march. Then Jan Palach's funeral came. It was a protest in fact, a huge number of students attended, and imagine, guys, that some high school students from Budějovice walked to the funeral. In January. I think they told me it took them three days. I wasn't one of them, I admit, but I had a friend who was."

"Student engagement increased significantly after that because the treaty on the 'temporary stay' of Warsaw Pact troops on our territory was about to be signed. Students declared an 'occupation strike' against the treaty, which meant we slept at the Faculty of Arts for days - I don't remember exactly; it was almost a week. At that time the facilities were not as good as they are today, so we slept mostly on the floor. That took some courage because we were surrounded by armoured personnel carriers. There were maybe four of them in front of the Faculty, aiming machine guns at us. But young people don't make a big deal of it, so they're not afraid. Actually, I remember some clever students managed to tap into the radio frequency those APCs used, so we listened to what they were saying. I remember they used code names, Eburo 1 to Eburo whatever. That was quite interesting to listen to. Of course, when we wanted to go out we didn't know if we were going to get arrested, so we used the sidewalk level exits where the supplies were delivered at the rear of the building - and they didn't guard us there, strangely enough. I personally acted as a liaison between high schools and the Faculty where one of my friends and I would visit the high schools in Prague and actually inform the students of what we were up to."