Jan Neckář

"Všetaty was absolutely surrounded and barricaded, the roads were blocked, VB (Public Security) patrols everywhere, and so I thought, we will get to the grave when we already decided to come here. So I started searching in an old car map to see which way I could take to get there, and I found a country road. By then it was getting dark, it was dark. So I got on the road and I drove and suddenly there was a flashlight in a bush and they stopped me, Public Security, their car was parked and well hidden. 'Where are you going?' 'Well, I'm going to Všetaty.' 'Who are you meeting there?' 'You don't know him.' 'Get out of the car.' So I had to give them my papers and everything, I'll keep it short. I had to turn around and go away, and of course the agency received a notification that I was an enemy who was going to Všetaty for the anniversary of Palach’s death. They immediately dealt with it at a party meeting, where Vašek was invited. And when my brother was explaining it to me, he said that some guy came and told him that he should reconsider his cooperation with me. That he should say goodbye to me."

"We received a notice which said that we had corrupted the director of the agency or one of the agency's bosses, so my brother went to Bartolomějská and he was questioned there for about two hours about what happened. It was a complete triviality. The guy, the boss, needed to move something, he bought some furniture and needed to move it to his house. And we had two Avias to move our equipment around, and the carrier offered us to move his stuff too. So he moved it there and someone saw him and reported him, saying that Neckář had bought the boss new bedroom furniture. Complete nonsense. Eventually it was resolved. Vašek then told us what happened at Bartolomějská, that there were two of them, one good, one bad. The good one interrogated him and then the bad one came and started choking him and so on."

"I remember we were pressed against the wall under that arcade, all the hands that were there kept pressing us. I was telling her, 'Just don't fall down or we'll be trampled.' Well, and the crowd in the arcade with the wide columns was moving in such a way that I thought that the crowd would tear down the columns and it would all fall on us. The pressure was extremely high. Who hasn't experienced it can't even, how should I put it, understand what it is like. Because it's hard to breathe in such a situation. And all of a sudden in that back part of the arcade it started to loosen up, there was an isle of cops, they formed an isle, and from there you could go out and they were beating everybody with batons."

"Well, the shock and the surprise was so big that nobody really knew what was happening, you know. Suddenly a tank barrel appeared in the window. The problem there was, and we already know all this today, that it was all set up, that the Russians had a permission, an invitation, a letter from certain people, comrades, who then arranged it all here, led by Biľak and all those potentates, who arranged that the planes could land at Ruzyně, normally they wouldn’t be able to do that. Just like in Ukraine now."