Petr Maišaidr

“We arrived to the Communist Party Headquarters and the Hungarian units were already there. What I remember was that the Hungarians in armored vehicles – I’m not sure if there were only the Hungarians, or if Russian tanks were there – I am certain that Hungarian units were there. And a majority of these soldiers had thrown their submachine guns to the ground and they were crying like little children and they were desperately apologizing to us. Somebody was shot there in front of the Communist Headquarters. I was certainly not among the first ones when I came to the Communist Party Headquarters, because some guys were running around there, carrying a bloodied Czechoslovak flag and saying. ´They’ve shot our friend to death.´ Then they formed a cordon of these armored vehicles and tanks and so we moved to the Wenceslas Square. I will never forget that Soviet soldier who dropped his submachine gun on the Wenceslas Square, and tears were streaming down his face and he was embracing us and begging us for forgiveness. But he probably didn’t live to see our times. Wenceslas Square was not really taken over by tanks, tanks were positioned only around the National Museum. That’s where the shooting began, they were shooting at the Museum. But I was somewhere halfway down the Wenceslas Square when it started, and so I didn’t see it well. I only knew there was shooting up there and people were lying on the ground, because bullets were whizzing right by our ears.”

“I did sign Charter 77. I was in the fifth wave of signatories, I think in May 1977. My signing it stemmed from my conviction, but it happened by coincidence because one of my colleagues at work, whose brother was a Charter organizer who was collecting the signatures, contacted him for me and thus I got the opportunity to sign the Charter. Since I was a scout leader, I considered it my necessary moral and ethical duty as a citizen of this country to join. But I have to admit that besides signing it, I was not involved in Charter 77 in any way, because I was afraid that it would get the StB interested in me and they would start watching me, because I was a leader of a group of scouts.” Interviewer: “Were there any consequences for you? Were you harassed by the StB?” – “Naturally, my having signed the Charter 77 had many negative consequences for me, both at work and at home, because I was being regularly summoned for interrogations, they would invite me two, three, or four times a year. The worst was the first interview when they summoned me and I spent about six hours in Bartolomějská St., it was not pleasant at all. After that they were more or less just trying to bother me at work, they were always coming to my workplace, to my flat, they were questioning my neighbours, and always trying to convince me to withdraw my signature. Obviously I always told them that I had no such intentions, and they left. The following years my case got transferred to the criminalist department in Vysočany where I lived, and it was quite funny, because these were regular criminalist cops, who had been ordered to conduct interviews with me, and thus about five times I would spend time with very nice policemen, they would make coffee for me, offer me cigarettes, and we would chat for an hour – one mentioned he had a summer house, I said I had a summer house, too, he said he liked fishing, I was telling him about my hobby of photographing animals and collecting plants for a herbarium, and after we had pleasantly chatted for thirty or forty minutes, they would ask: ´But do you know why we summoned you?´ I would say: ´Oh, sure, I know...´ – ´Don’t you want to withdraw it?´ ´No, I don’t want to.´ – ´OK, fine, that’s fine for us.´ We would shake hands and part as best friends and they would make a check mark in their documents that they have completed an assignment.”

“The following days (after August 21, 1968) were entirely different. The first day was a day of fighting and resistance, but then it was completely different. Meaning that people mostly tried to argue and reason with those Soviet soldiers – explaining that there was no counterrevolution here, that they were unneeded here. Whole families were coming there. Mothers with babies in prams were also coming, and since at that time everyone learned Russian at school, they were able to speak with the soldiers. And all the soldiers claimed that it was not their fault, that they came here as part of a military exercise – most of them were unhappy because of that. But I also remember a case, it happened by that famous Soviet tank on Smíchov Square, and some mother with a baby pram and children said to them: ´Well, and if they ordered you…?´ The soldier explained that he would have rather been in our country as a tourist rather than a soldier, that he didn’t want to do us any harm. And the mother asked: ´Well, but if they gave you an order to shoot, would you shoot at us?´ And he replied right into her face. ´Yes, I would shoot.´ And she asked: ´And you would really shoot me, and my baby in this pram?´ He said: ´Da.´”

“When I was kicked out of Prague grammar school and went to Litvínov, I already knew Český Jiřetín, it is a remote village right at the border with Germany, there are beautiful forests there, and it’s a wilderness area. They made me go to Litvínov, but something good always comes from something bad, and right during the summer holiday I went to see the local gamekeeper, for whom I had twice worked with part-time before, he was a chairman of the local state committee, and he told me: ´No problem, just take whatever you want, doesn’t matter, the houses are empty, just pick whichever you like and it’ll be yours.´ Well, I chose one, and to this day I have this cottage from 1840, I keep going there to my summer house, the surroundings there are stunning, obviously the nature looks very different from the time when we went there for scout summer camp in 1969-70, at that time there were primeval spruce forests. They all vanished and withered away due to exhaust emissions. On the other side of the Ore Mountains range, the trees didn’t get dry, but they preventively cut them all down, which is a pity. The East Germans haven’t done it, their forests are untouched, and if we had not done cut them down, we would have had the same forests today as the Germans have. The windward slopes did get dry, it was necessary to cut them down. I’m now talking about spruce. Beech, oak, birch – the deciduous trees – were not affected so much. Thus I became an avid cottage owner, which takes much of my time, which I might have spent wandering around the country, camping, but I have been working on improving my cottage and this gave me an opportunity to try out various skills, which later came very handy during the scouting summer camps which we organized in 1969-70 in the woods around Český Jiřetín, where one of the participants was the famous ´Akéla´ Vláďa Kolář.”