"As for the books, I'll tell you a story. Libri prohibiti. In 1969, they started removing uncomfortable books from libraries. There were lists of what was to be discarded. And this Mrs. Fraňková and I were picking out some of the books. I was thinking, "Oh, those are a shame in the shredding. I used to put them aside and send them home and to friends. Because the book publishing had such a catch-up, there were still books coming out in 1969 that were allowed in 1968, but then they were banned, so they didn't even appear on the shelves. But they did appear in that library. So a few friends and I were going through the books, and we were going through what interested whom. So we came up with titles that didn't appear in libraries or bookstores, which was an advantage. The downside was that I sent those books to friends, and many of them were never returned to me afterwards. In short, they were lent out. Of course, because the books were circulating as samizdat. When some of Škvorecký's books came out and then couldn't be published anymore, people borrowed them and they got lost somewhere in the world. But books are supposed to travel, not sit in libraries."
"That was quite cruel. I was standing on the ramp right here on Wenceslas Square by the museum when they started to sprinkle it. I fell down on the curb, and I would never have believed that I could flatten myself like a sheet of paper. Because when bullets whistle over your head and you see the wounded and the dead next to you, it's an unpleasant feeling. Don't forget, I was less than twenty-one. You were angry. So we had nothing better to do than to get some cramp iron. They had barrels of oil on the back of the tanks, which I didn't understand. When I go into battle, I wouldn't keep that on my tank. All you had to do was swing the cramp iron, put a hole in it and light it. But what we didn't realize was that the bullets from those machine guns and machine guns can kill you. It was only when you saw the wounded. So I was careful. And I did one more indiscretion, it was such a patriotic act that I sewed a Czechoslovak flag on the back of my jacket. And now I was told, 'You're stupid, you've got a target on your back, take it off.' And then, when they declared martial law, you weren't allowed to go out at night. That was pretty bad. We'd be out somewhere in the evening, and when we'd come home, we'd have to look on the streets to see if there was a car coming. Because they could shoot anybody who was out at night. That wasn't a nice feeling."
"It was a comical affair with my great-aunt, I described it in the book. She was arrested in Pardubice and when she came back - she was childless - my grandfather and grandmother said, we have to give something to Olga. On the corner of Pařížská Street and Old Town Square, now they sell some expensive watches, but before that there was a Bijoux de Bohème shop. Necklaces and bracelets, glass rhinestones set in silver or alpace. They bought it for Olga and she opened it when she came to Pařízská. We were all there waiting for her. She opened it and immediately slammed it shut and threw it out the window. Because in Pardubice the women had to work, they had black velvet and they sorted these slides. That's where they made the jewellery. It was exported all over the world. Rich women all over the world bought it, saying it was absolutely beautiful, and they didn't know that it was made by women prisoners in Bohemia, in Pardubice. We had a good laugh about it. My grandfather and grandmother bought it for her as an expensive gift, and they had no idea that they were taking it over in the prison, that they were making it there."
David Jan Novotný was born on 28 November 1947 in Prague in the family of graphic designer and illustrator Jan Blahoslav Novotný. He grew up with his two older sisters in an evangelical environment, his grandfather was the evangelical pastor and theologian Adolf Novotný. From the age of four, the family lived in Josefov in the heart of Prague’s Old Town. After graduating from eleven years school, he was not admitted to documentary filmmaking at FAMU, and before entering military service he had several mostly manual jobs. Shortly after the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops, his entire family emigrated, but he was unable to leave because he had already received a draft order at that time and therefore was not issued a passport. After returning from the military services in 1970, he started working in a printing house, but shortly afterwards he was accepted to study screenwriting at FAMU. In the 1970s he married and had two sons, Josef (1975) and Matěj (1977). He worked as a scriptwriter and dramaturg at Barrandov. In 1981 he was able to travel to Switzerland to visit his parents for the first time. His mother returned to Czechoslovakia after his father’s death in 1983. After 1989, during the privatisation of Barrandov, he left there and began working as a teacher at FAMU and at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University. Since 2008 he has been a lecturer in dramaturgy at the Academy of Letters, where he was vice-rector from 2010-2013. He is the author of several screenplays and many fiction books. He converted to Judaism in the 1990s and has written several books on Jewish mysticism and history.
