Jaromír Plíšek

“These small problems started building up, and my military service was coming to an end, and I remember that one day I said to myself: I’ll go to the elections. I don’t have the strength any more, seeing how things are here. They’d lock me up, they’d find some excuse to stand me before a military tribunal for sedition, they’d find some excuse. So I agreed to myself to have the following stance: I wouldn’t try to make excuses, I wouldn’t tell myself it didn’t matter, that there was no difference. There was a difference, and it did matter. But I’ll go because I’m afraid. And if someone asks me why I went, I’ll tell that it’s because I’m afraid, I won’t make any pretences.”

“Of course, I remember Palach’s days, they were... sad. After taking that breath. As a growing boy I mostly remember the emotional side of the matter, first that breath of air in sixty-eight, and then having it all crushed, the way people resigned themselves to it, acquiesced, bent their backs and lost all their spark. I think that was one of the worst things to ever happen to devastate our society. I can’t compare it with the Fifties, I don’t remember those. The brutality wasn’t physical, but it was bad mentally.”

“I didn’t want to do military service, of course, few people did. A friend of mine said that military service was boot camp for life under totality, that the system would swallow you up and there was no escaping it. People tried to get what was called the Blue Book, which was confirmation that the person really can’t do military service for health reasons. But few people managed to get that, either you had to be really ill, or have amazingly good connections. But the vast majority of us were drafted. Military service was for two years, but university students had a different system, from about the third year we attended what was called the military department, that is, once a week instead of school we went for military training at Motol here in Prague. Then over the holidays perhaps before the last year of school there was a month-long military training session, that was pretty unpleasant, we had to lob grenades, for example. I’m not good even at throwing stones, so it was difficult for me. But no one liked being there. Later on, graduates only had to do one year, so it was easier, but not necessarily and not always.”

“...If you know the Biblical book of Daniel, there’s a king there called Nebuchadnezzar, and from time to time throughout his reign he would declare that whenever the trumpets were to sound throughout the land, that his people should come and bow before a statue of the king made of gold and silver. And whoever would not bow, he would be thrown into the fiery furnace... Read the Book of Daniel, it’s a nice book, and it fits perfectly to the working principle of a totalitarian regime. The elections under Communism weren’t election at all, but just this sounding of trumpets, when all the citizens of the state were to go bow before the statue. There was no one to elect, all the representatives and functionaries had been chosen long before somewhere within the Communist Party. And the people were merely to show loyalty to the regime by coming there, refusing to go behind the screen to hide who they voted for, but instead to manifest, so to say, by taking the envelope that they gave you, which contained the right names and the right parties, in actual fact there was just one, and by putting it into the ballot box before the eyes of the committee - they would tick the box that ‘František Vonásek remains loyal.’ The turnout was 99,9 per cent, and those who dared to not go to the elections, those were individual people and they were asking, pardon my Czech, for a shitload of trouble, that was almost like running someone over with a car, the Communists were capable of locking you up for that under some pretence or other.”