Monika Němcová

"I was rather afraid that they might really do something to us. Because it was not only about a few people who, for example, were beaten or… It is said that actually communism, I call it communism even though it was not de facto communism. It was said that it was actually mild here, that people were not killed and shot here. They didn't shoot, but they weren't completely mild, the STB. For example, they threatened me, I said it even to the One Hundred Student Revolutions, I was young, when I was picked up at the station. Six guys sat around me and they said, if I don't say the names with whom the concerts are organized, who brings what we rewrite, they will all rape me. That I can't even imagine what they'll do to me. And I was a sixteen-year-old girl." "Were you prepared by anyone for what such an interrogation might look like?" "No. No, because, I don't think anyone can prepare you for that. You just don't understand what's going on at all."

"I was then, I was sixteen. I wanted to travel, we couldn't travel. It's funny today, but there was a queue for meat in the store. You got good meat - sirloin, only when someone hid it under the counter. Under the counter means that you don't buy it normally, but you have to bribe someone to give you a sirloin steak. There was a queue for oranges. We were standing in a queue in front of the bookstore every Thursday morning to buy a book. We couldn't travel anywhere at all. And most importantly, we couldn't read what we wanted to read. Here was clearly given literature that you could buy, borrow and you couldn't read more. In the newspapers there were only things that were supporting the communist party. You had no freedom at all to think. You could have thought what you wanted, but you had no source at all to form an official worldview other than the fact that you were locked in that box here and you could do nothing at all. Apart from, for example, an exit permit to East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, not everyone received it, we did not have passports. "