Jan Mamula

"We're with Franta, or we, Franta was the initiator of that and that was kind of a petition." - "Franta Šilar?" - "Franta Šilar. And about twenty or twenty-five of us signed it, and it went to the ministry, and it was a very sincere outpouring of our anxiety that we live in a time when our pastors, whom we respect, are having their approval taken away, and we're supposed to go to church, so we actually sent a very innocent text to the one without... so we bypassed the instance route, like outside the faculty, and we sent it to the Ministry of Culture."

"And I was going to go fishing for bream for the first time, because the bream start sometime at the end of August, I baited a certain spot, I prepared my boat, an anchor, I still don't understand it, but I got up at three o'clock, at four o'clock I was sitting on the boat and waiting. And it was strange to me that there were some trains going by, some other trains than other times, some truck and then another one, helicopters were flying above me, but I was waiting for the bream and they were starting, around seven o'clock, and suddenly my mother comes running down the hillside, holding a transistor in her hand, it was still one of those that was wrapped in leather, and she says: 'Honza, come here, the Russians are here.' So I took the rods, threw them in the corner and haven't touched them since."

"And it was always the custom that on Sundays, when there was a game on, there would be dozens of guys on the hillside by the fence of our garden, and my grandfather would let them go up our steps and so on. Just a special Sunday atmosphere, everybody was there cheering the football. And I remember, it's one of my earliest memories of my childhood, that we had a picnic on our side of the fence, and my grandmother was there, who didn't go there much, and there was drinking, eating, and little Jeníček Mamula just said something like 'Communists are swine'. I don't think it was said that strongly in our country at that time, but something...And they jumped on me and pressed a pillow on me to keep me quiet, and everybody froze because there were these people around. So that was like fifty-three, fifty-four, fifty-five, my first encounter with reality."