Jiří Razskazov

“They ordered me to turn it off immediately, to immediately take down those outrageous posters from the shop window, and of course I refused. So, I mainly said that they don't have anything to order me around, that my founder is Supraphon, that this is how it happens in Prague and there is consent, of course I was saying all possible things there. That Czechoslovak Socialist Youth Union and everyone agrees with it, so I'm not going to remove anything there. So, they wrote a protocol with me and said if I don't stop it, so I said no, so they called the police and I had to officially lock the shop and they sealed it so that I couldn't get into the shop again and the police took me back for an explanation, so I laugh that I am probably one of the last people questioned by the police on November 23. The policemen were already very reasonable and it was more like a discussion about how I think it will turn out, they asked me. Well, as it turns out, the Bolsheviks will simply go away. And they said: 'And do you think that there will be some kind of repression and that those people would sort of settle their accounts?' And I said: “Probably with those who hurt people, so with those, they will probably have a hard time, right.” You could see how the cops didn't like it at all. Well, after about three or four hours they let me go.'

"For example, they were bossing us around in a crazy way. We hated the director for that, and ten years later, when we met, I blamed him for that. He made us have short hair, right. Which was crazy, I'm probably the last one in the class out of the two or three of us who resisted not cutting our hair and then he gave us a really hard choice, either get expelled from school, because there's a rule there, or get a haircut. So, for the first time in my life, I probably went soft, and I was terribly ashamed of it, as of myself, and I was terribly humanly insulted and I hated him terribly for it, and I will never forgive him simply because that is rape, of which we talk about how to humiliate a person. You can experience that in the military service, something like that, but we were at an industrial school and I never forgave him, and I knew that this particular director, whose name was Mr. Fiala, as an expert, was excellent, as a teacher or a professor I loved him, because he was always fair, but as he was a communist and I know that he kicked out a lot of great teachers from that school, which as sixteen-year-old and seventeen-year-old boys full of ideals, we couldn't forgive him. And the teachers were leaving exactly when we were at the school, because I came in 1972, and in 1973, 1974 there were already the last purges, when capable engineers and such professors were thrown out of that school, and they with tears in their eyes were saying goodbye to us and left and they cried and we cried too, yeah."

"They were the biggest idiots, the biggest primitives, drunkards, and the biggest mob there was, it's completely like they stood outside of all laws, they didn't have it at all. The communists gave them weapons already in the 1948s, it's something senseless to create such an unregulated organ and those people had machine guns, submachine guns and everything. And there really wasn't anyone normal there with them. They were the worst garbage, yes, they wanted to play soldiers. So we had them, even in Prague, and at that the general strike was the biggest fear, the militiamen represented the biggest, the biggest fear. What they did in the 1960s, how they beat people and actually shot them then, they shot those guys over there in Děčín district, they were scary. The army was organized, the police were relatively normal, the State Security officers they were worse, but the militias were really scary, yeah."

"But today, when you look back on it thirty years later, it doesn't strike anyone anymore, or forty years. And then if I compare it, for example, with the Russian grandfather what he lived through and with the Čáslav grandfather in the concentration camp, it really was nothing. Well, they were nasty, but we reckoned on that. So, they kept asking for names, I said that I don't remember any names after a year. They kept wanting me to sign something for them, I said that I would never sign anything for them, they didn't want to let me go, not even to a toilet, yeah. They thought they were going to get me, so I did it somewhere in the corner and that was it, well. And they wouldn't give me a drink.'