Zdeněk Pinc

“It was such a strange agreement between the ones who rule and those who are ruled. That's the most terrible collaboration you can do. 'We will not force you to believe in what we preach. Let us rule in peace and we will let you steal and cheat in peace. But you have to be careful not to overdo it.' And on this, a solid coalition is formed from both sides with a bad conscience, which largely lasts to this day. The habit of normalizing - the word is chosen perfectly - let's get back to what is normal. And what is normal is disgusting, it stinks, but it's warm. During normalization, nothing terrible happened to most people. I didn't even get a slap in the whole time either. And most other people were even better off than I was. And all of this was threatened by that step to freedom, we all expected that it would be bad and that these people would not last."

"In the fall of 1967, when socialism was struggling a bit, there was a shortage of electricity. Power was cut off periodically at various locations. One of the affected places was the student dormitories in Strahov, especially the engineering faculty. They turned off the electricity there. Mechanical engineering students did a lot of drawing back then, and it's really uncomfortable to do it in the dark. The dean of the faculty at the time, he was quite a jerk, a certain Professor Bolek, he was known that he did not care that the students did not have light and that they had to have those drawings done or they would be expelled. Desperate students once stood up after such an absence of electricity lasting several hours and went to Prague. They chanted: 'We want light, we want to study!' The police interpreted the slogan 'We want light' as meaning that they want to abolish the darkness of the Bolsheviks. Therefore, emergency units were sent to them and they got beated in Újezd near Strahov. A number of students ended up in hospital, many were arrested. It was obvious that those arrested and others, the organizers, would be duly punished. But this was not an event of the university district committee, it was an event of the dormitory council in Strahov. We managed to get information about that event at a meeting of the highest body of the then Czechoslovakia, it was not the parliament, but the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Czech Republic. Gertruda Sekaninová, who was a regular member of the Central Committee, sat there. An extraordinarily cool woman, a real lady. And her son Michal was a student at the time, a friend. He studied at the Faculty of Law. We sent information about what happened through Michal to the mother. She then said in the Central Committee: 'Where have we come to when you are now beating our children? I had a son there!' Others were joining in and also admitting that their children were there. There was a big boom. The students declared that not only were they not satisfied with not being punished, they demanded that the police would be punished."

“We collectively started learning Gypsy language, and we marveled at how different they were. In fact, almost all of us were afraid to go there among them, and almost all of us pretty much fell in love with the environment. The thing about gypsy families is that they can be wonderfully sad and wonderfully cheerful, and they are almost always either sad or cheerful, whereas we, according to them, can neither be sad nor cheerful and are always so bland. They call us gajjo or gajji. The dictionary says it means 'non-caste'. They come from caste based Indian society. Yes, that's true, but the word actually means something like 'faceless'. For me, the turning point came when [...] When a gypsy curator or another white person comes to a gypsy agglomeration - back then there were still gypsy agglomerations, maybe five or six gypsy families lived at one address in those miserable shacks in old Libeň. That was remarkable - and the children running around everywhere calling out: 'O gadja avla!' - 'The white one has come!' After some time, they started calling: 'Oh Zdenek avla!' I already had a face.'

"Palach was a shock, that someone still takes it so deadly seriously. But the reaction of the population was that they would rather do anything than see young people die in such a horrible way. For me, Zajíc [the self-immolation of Jan Zajíc] was a commitment, I said it here in embarrassing exaggeration the other day. If it happened that the public would come to their senses again and start to fight in some way, I would think that sooner or later I have to take my turn. Because that's how we felt. Back then it was still our business. Whereas for most of that society it was no longer their business."

"Příbram back then, it was two cities. Stará Příbram, which was a typical Central Bohemian town - although a mining one, but a fairly normal town with some 16,000 inhabitants. When the uranium boom started there, suddenly a lot of foreigners flocked there. And especially [...] My childhood is associated with permanent bus routes, a whole series of buses that had seats arranged in a special way. It was not one behind another, but one opposite the other. This is because the convicts, i.e. the political prisoners, who were sitting inside, had to stare inside the bus so as not to look outside. I remember that well. Those released convicts after 1960, when I started going to pubs, those pubs were full of released prisoners who stayed there and settled there and lived there. They mingled with the miners. My cult experience from my youth is from the Na Marjánce pub, which is no longer existing today. Workers' pub. There, as one entered, there stood a huge miner in larger than life size, pointing to the slogan: 'I am a miner, who is more?' When a student from a secondary grammar school entered that pub, it was actually a secondary comprehensive school, but we all called it a secondary grammar school, at least one miner's hand was raised in the hall and they showed: 'Who is more?'' The correct answer was: 'Two miners.' Whoever could do this, the guest turned to the waiter and said: 'Two.' One for me and one for the young one. When you knew how to do it, you had maybe five beers on the table at once. To which you were not entitled, because you were only [...] And when you did not know this, someone threw you out of that hall through the flying doors so that you would learn facts and not go into the pub."

“Why was it called the Velvet [Revolution]? What is made of velvet? Theater curtains. It was a revolution of the theater people. The Velvet Revolution was not a revolution meaning that it wanted to pull back the curtain on the old regime and start a new negotiation. That's how it goes in the theater, in life it's not that the curtain just goes down and comedy can come after the tragedy."

(Student asks) "We use telephones today to share information. You said you reproduced speeches. We assume that's information sharing, how did it go?" – "That's simple. Using all duplicating machines, starting with ormig or xerox [...]" – (Student) "That's what?" – "These are historical machines from the last century, with which texts, and in some cases also images, could be reproduced in several tens or hundreds of copies. If these devices were already in Czechoslovakia at the time, very rarely, they were under the supervision of the People's Militia and under strict control, and working on them was not only forbidden - except for work tasks - but it was a criminal offense. The only device that was not considered reproductive was the typewriter. You don't really know what such a machine looked like either. It was an electric typewriter, that was a great invention because with the help of carbon paper, you could put up to 14 or 15 thin papers in that machine, of which you had to have a good amount. The greatest art was to fold the carbon papers, which were either blue or black, and stack the thin papers under that and then type out the text with the proper keystroke. And you had ten, twelve, or even fourteen of those copies. When you typed on an electric typewriter, the first copy was unusable because the machine shattered it, it had to be thrown away, but there were more of them. A normal machine wouldn't fit more than ten, but there were even machines that allowed you to switch the tape from blue to red, so you could, for example, make capital letters red. It was stupid when you made a typo. When you tapped the wrong letter, it was not possible to go back and delete it and tap another one. There were so-called correction papers for this, which were, of course, under the law and were distributed at work, you couldn't actually buy them at all. It was inserted there, you used it to cut out the wrong letter and then you could tap another one there. But there was a white mark."

"For me, it started when I learned about how the state government reacted. And this time, the state government, as it always does, behaved super nasty and hunted the 242 signatories like wild game. If you want to read something about it, the most emotionally significant is the memoir novel by Pavel Kohout Kde je zakopán pes. For me, the decisive person in that affair was Professor Patočka, who was my supervisor and beloved teacher, and he became one of the three first speakers of the Charter. I didn't learn about the Charter until January, when I learned about the repressions and my immediate thought was [...] At that time, Sváťa Karásek sang a song like this, Sváťa Karásek was an evangelical priest without the consent to perform the function of a priest, he was in prison with the Plastic People of the Universe. And that song had the words: 'You, strong in faith, forged in scripture, when the shepherds start beating, where are you hiding?' And in the words of that song, we felt it necessary to say at the time, 'We're not hiding, we signed it too.'"

"A favorite form of torture by State Security personnel was that they drop a summons for interrogation into your mailbox, and the interrogation takes place - in my case, it took place very regularly in Benešov. It was 30 kilometers away, but the interrogation always took place in such a way that I arrived in Benešov to that Public Security station, they made me sit there for two or three hours and then they told me that the comrade who summoned me didn't have time, and I went home. And at home I already had a summons for the next week, always for the day I had the so-called housing seminar. If you didn't go there, there was a possibility that you would be brought to court and receive a fine of 500 crowns. And 500 crowns was a very good salary for a week of work at that time. You can't often afford that."