Jiří Reidinger

"The worst was [Palach's] week. They were there, of course, they always outdid us somehow... But I remember this week, it was every day, I don't know, those six days, it was maybe on the fourth day... I remember they chased us, they chased us with the white batons, one of the policemen tried to hit a pregnant woman and she fell... I yelled at him, are you crazy? She's pregnant! And of course, they attacked me, five of them, they started to hit me without any sense, as I had those "Lennon" glasses they luckily felt down. And some lady said - he lost his glasses, what are you doing to him? They took me, well, they become scared, when civilians see what they are doing, they become... a little calmer, they said something, they took him into Anton (police car) or let me go... I don't remember. My back was completely blue, then we met with Sylvia Krobova at Olga Havlova's place. But in the end it did not deter me and I went there again the next day, because there were meetings and it was important to just be there so the crowd becomes "thicker". I know I described somewhere, that we recognised each other by being wet..."

It was easy, I think he did it so many times, but it's nice here that it was in the eighty-eighth year. Andrej, Andrej Krob, came to see me because we were testing Kvak and Žbluňek with Lenka [Machoninová] with him and he said: "Would it not be possible, we are looking for .... Vasek... at you." Ok, ok, so I will go there and he here, of course. We organized everything “as a conspiration”.It was easy for us to take him to Elektrárenská, he would be there for four nights, they might not come there, and then he would go out and finally go to Václavák and say 'Hello' there before they arrest him. It was clear that he would be arrested anyway. Well, he really went there, it was a conspiracy, because he was somewhere in the Realistic Theatre, I got a car, 1203, that we will secretly ... him there... He of course wanted to have a chat with the actresses, so we had to take him with a taxi, the car had to be cancelled. There we baked a rabbit, which I had from Šumava. And he said, 'The baking, that's beautiful.' So we talked there until night, which was really nice. Unfortunately, I was unable to turn on my gas heater and as it was the end of October was, I was saying to myself, 'There's no spark, so I'll go see Andrej and he'll come here tomorrow to fix it somehow.' But it was not freezing badly, but [Havel] was very sensitive, so I was saying to myself, Jesus, I had to give him some extra blankets, it was upstairs he slept on a small platform. It was recorded like that in the video journal, it was already being recorded independently once a month, so that people can see for themselves how the dissidents looked like. They were not allowed to be in television, they did not know them, not even Vaclav Havel, so they started to record such videocassettes. "

"My dad, of course, at the time — they were making napkins and some toilet paper, big rolls, there in the paper mills. They wrote Saldati idite damoj on the napkins when the Russians came, they printed it and distributed it. But they euphoria lasted for a while and after that I know we looked under the sofa and the napkins were hidden there but we were not allowed to talk about it. Father, as he was so scared, that something bad can happen to three of us, his sons, that we would not be allowed to study or something, despite being from a strictly Catholic family decided to join the Communist Party. He never really participated, but he had this feeling... I know he regretted it afterwards. When I was writing to samizdat in 1980s and instead of money the always gave me books- from Skvorecki, Havel or Solzhenicyn- The Gulag Archipelago, he was really happy to be able to read it. My mother wasn't happy, she wanted to burn those books. So it was apparent that this honesty stayed in him, that he joined the communists only out of fear. There was Svazarm etc..."