Tomáš Molnár

“During that time we started to hang out with different long-hairs from Lysá, we went to the bar Vinná Réva, but we had a rule that we didn’t drink any alcohol. When we went there we didn’t bring the barman any business because just drank raspberry lemonade which made him angry, it wasn’t too kind to him. The other way around: we felt inside that we had to save the other long-hairs who were getting drunk. So we started trying to coax them into going to church – and successfully. In any case, it brought us attention. Even if that attention was only secondary. The first thing was one of our friends, Jenda Šenků, had an Aero at home and then another guy everyone called ‘Satan,’ I don’t know why, had an Aero at home too. And Jenda Šenků wanted to give him some parts from his Aero so we loaded them into his Wartburg and took them to Satan, where we loaded them onto the sidewalk, rang his doorbell, and gave them to him. Someone saw us and because some cars in the area had been stolen at the time, someone reported us and the police came. They were normal cops, it was all clear that it was a mistake, but we said something during the investigation that caught the ears of the StB, that we did were doing something else, something murky, instead of stealing a car. So they started watching us and we ended up getting arrested and investigated over and over because they thought we were an anti-government cell. Once they came at four in the morning, pulled us out bed and then we came back home at six in the evening, different police officers took turns with us, one was the nice, the other mean, classic. One made threats; the third sucked up to us, the baloney they came up with was marvelous. It even turned out that in ’78 or ’79, I was already eighteen then, three guys ended up collaborating, but then there was amnesty and that amnesty freed them of it.”

“The three of us became really close friends [they pretended to be the Rychlé šípy (Quick Darts) – the heroes of Foglar’s books], we had a clubhouse at home in the parsonage on the veranda. We wrote a diary, a chronicle of those Quick Darts. Then there were the enemies – the Mažnáks and the Brotherhood of the Cat Paws – and these were clearly defined. There were three of us siblings, our parents were at the parent teacher conference for my sister but they didn’t make it to mine in time, then they went to meet my teacher outside of the ordinary parents association and we found out later that at that parents association my teacher was speaking, and, in terms of the normalization period, she was more diligent, dedicated than normalization called for, and she said that it was inappropriate for the other children to be friends with me because I was the son of a pastor, a class-enemy of society. And for the parents [of my classmates] to follow suit. So the parents really did follow suit and it was in this way that after the year 1969 I lost all of the normal friends that a kid has. Červenáček even came and took our chronicle. Everyone was being so petty; he took the chronicle and gave it the Brotherhood of the Cat Paws. One boy, who was a bit more brutal, maybe today he’s a fine guy, I can’t say, he read it aloud in a mocking way in class and then tore it to pieces. The effort to somehow justify it was dumb, zealous; the parents probably played a part in it too. So I really didn’t have any friends for many years and what saved me was having this big garden where one can engage in a bunch of awesome things even without the warm presence of human contact.”