Jana Ondřejčková

"Charter 77, that's my sore point. When Charter 77 was signed, at the beginning of the year, shortly thereafter, I don't know if it was Die Welt, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or Spiegel, there was a huge article against Havel [a mistake, it was actually an article about Havel, not against him]. And my boss, who knew that I didn't want to write anything, and I wasn't an editor yet, called me in and said, 'It would help me a lot if you could write a one-page comment on this article, like a note.' And I said, 'You know my opinion, no, I won't do it.' The editor told me that we should write it because it had appeared in the West German press, and that it would be published in Czech for all the foreign language versions. I said, 'No, I'm not going to write anything.' I could never say that to another boss in my life, I think I'd have to quit right then. He was like, 'You're not helping me to get you back in the editorial team. Who knows what's going to happen.' I said, 'I don't care.' And he said, 'We'll compromise.' And that's the point I'm ashamed of. He said, 'I'll write it under your name, I'll say you wrote it,' and I said, 'Do whatever you want,' and I should have said at that point, 'No, I'm not going to do it."

"There were two fundamental questions. The two fundamental questions were, at least for us, 'Do you agree with fraternal aid?' And the second question was, it was the beginning of normalization: 'Do you agree that it has to be normalized? So I said 'no' to both questions. Comrade Landovský was sitting there, they were from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. There were about five or six members of that commission. And the leader, František Böse, my supervisor. You were sitting in front of that commission, it happened in the editor's room. Now, 'Why don't you agree?' I, as a girl, said, 'Because all my life I believed that the Soviet Union was our best friend, and I don't think that's what friends do to each other.' I was so naive, I was telling them, these interrogators, 'It was a shock to me, because friends don't do this to each other.' 'And what, then, should they do?' I said, 'Friends need to discuss it and find a way, but not this.'"

"Then we went to the corner to the main road, there were tanks there. Jirka says: 'Hey, let's go and convince the soldiers' - that was an idea! - 'and we'll explain to them that they shouldn't be here, that we don't have this creeping counter-revolution, as they said.' And now, with horror, we suddenly saw a boy wrapped in a Czechoslovak flag on the pavement. And we recognized the boy who was on the sprinkler truck. That was terrible, I tell you. And now there was a pool of blood and people standing around in silence in the turmoil. My husband was deathly pale. He was having a terrible time. And we went, another older gentleman joined us, and we went from one tank to another. On one tank I saw a young man crying there, with tear tracks on his dusty cheeks, holding the machine gun and crying. All the other faces were stone-faced, they weren't talking to us. We were explaining to them, I tried to speak Russian. Only at the third tank was there a young officer who was willing to talk to us. And he said to us, which was published afterwards, 'We didn't know we were coming to you. We didn't know it was like this. We don't understand why there is such a protest against us, why they are painting these pictures on the tanks. We are a garrison in Poland and we received an immediate order that we have to help our Slav brothers, the Czechs, because we are standing on the threshold of the Third World War,' he said literally, 'on the threshold of the Third World War - because the Western imperialists have invaded the border areas, the border areas of the Czechoslovak Republic. And that is why we are here.'"

"The Soviet soldiers came, they were boys. Quite a few of them were from the Caucasian republics, by the looks of it. Well, they came to us in the corridor, we had to stand, at least the part of us that were in the corridor had to stand facing the wall. And then I felt a kind of a twinge in my back, and a Soviet soldier with a machine gun in my back picked me out and motioned me towards the other side of the corridor. That's where the news reporters were doing their reports, that's where the clippers were, that kind of background. And he sort of led me with that machine gun in my back to the first door, and he opened it and didn't yell, but he said normally, 'Gdě eto vyključajetsja?' That is, I had to go into three rooms in turn, and he followed me, and I had to take cables out of the sockets. And so we went to the second room - 'Gdě eto vyključajetsja?' So I had to turn it all off in the third room, and he took me back."

"And my husband believed in communist ideas. He believed in them when he was a boy. My father-in-law [his father] was so warm, and the stepmother in general, even though she cooked in the general staff. But gradually, in that war, when he got to know the situations, it was then during the time of Čepička, information leaked out to him about the PTP (Technical auxiliary battalion) and so on. He told me that suddenly he didn't want to believe it. Because he believed in the ideas. But yet he was very thoughtful, he was always thinking and looking for ways to get at some sources, to sort of put it together. Because, as he told me, it was terrible for him that something he believed in would suddenly fall apart. But then it got to the point where it became unbearable for him in the military. The clash with reality that occurred under Čepička. That's when he said he couldn't be here anymore and he would leave." "So that means your husband started waking up in the fifties?" "Yes, but still, he was far from knowing all the horrors. That came afterwards. The beginning of 1968, when the horrors of the political trials began to be published, when we illegally got London's Confessions, was a huge shock and I think a personal tragedy for him. I saw him crying for the first time, because for him it was mainly an inner disappointment in what he believed."

"My file was slim, and that's where I learned why I ended up in German studies. It said something about my political outlook, my overview of the international situation. And 'being from a working-class background, she has all the qualifications to study a Western language'. A Western language - that is, one who wanted to study English, French, so-called Western languages, had a better chance if he was of working-class origin. So I learned that for that reason - because I was of working-class origin. There was nothing about my parents being in the party. The working-class background was a guarantee that he should only know der, die, das, but he could go to the famous German studies. I learned that in that year 1968."