Petr Pintner

“My father was an artist, he worked in the film industry. My father was a non-communist. As an artist he was a free-thinker. I can say that he was a part of that cultural scene which evolved in the film business of that time. Thanks to my father I had a chance to see some films which were normally not screened in cinemas, only in art cinema clubs. My range of knowledge was thus a bit broader than that of an ordinary person.”

“I believe that on the whole, freedom has decayed significantly in the past years. For instance, in the USA you cannot say whatever you want. Many things are forbidden. I recall this statement of president Bush: ´Those who are not with us are against us!´ He must have copied this from the communists! And even the communists eventually let go of this, they had claimed this in the 1950s, but then they began to consider this idea obsolete.”

“One day we were sitting in front of our school. Some man was walking by, he looked completely devastated, and he held a newspaper in his hand. He turned at me – a seven- or eight-year-boy – and he said: ´Look what they are doing! They sentenced a woman to the death penalty.´ That woman was Milada Horáková. Then he threw the paper on the ground and walked away. I took the newspaper and began reading it. Milada Horáková – sentenced for espionage. When I came home, I asked my father what a spy was. He replied that I would understand it when I grew older. I will never forget this.”

“I didn’t attend the compulsory lectures of the Czechoslovak Youth Union. What happened was the same thing as with the Marxism-Leninism class. I was told that I had to attend the class. There was one professor to whom I told my opinion. He was speaking some nonsense about Berlin, and I asked him what he was talking about. I said that our entire country was surrounded by a fence just like a concentration camp, and that had there been no borders, they would have seen an interesting thing: people would be fleeing from the East to the West, and not the other way round. I told him simple things like that. I was a class clown at that time, they nicknamed me Mates. The entire auditorium was laughing. The guy was completely embarrassed. After this he wrote that individuals like me were of no use to the university.”