Prof. RnDr., DrSc Marcel Rejmánek

“With the article in Nature, it was still a bit later. I then worked at the mathematical centre of the biological institutes in České Budějovice, and there I worked mainly with entomologists. So Dr Starý and I managed to put together so-called food webs based on his data on aphids and parasites and the hosts of those aphids, and on this basis, we actually calculated what the relationships are between the so-called connectivity and the number of species and how it can be related to the stability of those associations. We submitted this to the journal Nature. And to our great surprise, it was actually accepted there - it was published. However, now the problem was how to get it [the publication] because in that issue there was probably something about the abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union. So I had to get special permission to look at my own article in the university library in Prague. This succeeded - and then I said I wanted to copy it because I didn’t have the money to pay for the offprint (the offprints had to be paid for). So I had to get another permission to have my article xeroxed there - and thanks to that, after a few weeks, I finally got hold of the first copy of that article from Nature. Well, those were the times.”

“That was a shock for all of us, of course. Things were getting worse, my professor Jan Jeník was fired from the university for political reasons. I stayed there, I basically inherited his office but also his main friends, who then gradually forced me to leave as well. I finished my thesis there, even though my main supervisor had already been fired. Still, Professor Hadač, who was a member of the academy, took over after me, so I finished it under his guidance, and then I stayed there as a so-called technical assistant. That was probably the maximum they could offer a non-communist. They also asked if I would join that party, so I said no. My colleague instructed me that the best thing to do was to tell them immediately and that if I said that maybe I would think about it, I would never get rid of them, but that it was best to tell them immediately. It worked like that, and indeed, I had to join the Socialist Youth Union, that was the concession I made. I said I would start an environmental club. Then I invited all kinds of people who were on the edge of political tolerability to the environmental club. So actually, under the Socialist Youth Union, there were some dissidents with whom the students could talk. So it was somewhat of a paradox.”

“It was unanimous only between my wife and me - no one else knew about it. We didn’t tell our parents or relatives about it because we knew that they would be interrogated afterwards, and it had been far better that they didn’t know anything about it. Only after did we send some letters from Austria. The children didn’t know about it either, they thought we were only going to Yugoslavia. I kept hiding the map so they wouldn’t see that Yugoslavia also had a sea because they would want to go straight to the sea - and so instead, we took it straight across the Karavanka mountains to the Austrian border. The children were four and eight years old. The younger one didn’t care at all, but I told the older one there. When we crossed the border, I told him that this might be the most important day of his life, and I told him what had happened. He told me we should have told him so he could take his collection of stones with him.”

“I would say that the sad thing is that in the end, we already discussed this in different clubs–for example with Bedřich Moldan 40 years ago–and we came to the same conclusion that the lifestyle needs to be changed, that we need to stop thinking in this linear way, where everything must lead to greater consumption and greater things. And now we’re discussing it again. It’s sad that after 40 years, we come to the same conclusion as then, but how to change people’s thinking, I don’t know. Of course, education is very important, but it must be taken into account that people don’t change much, so if artificial meat, which is made from plants, is being promoted now, it will only be successful if it has a comparable price and a comparable taste. If it’s going to be more expensive or if it doesn’t have the same flavour, it’s not going to work. So I feel that we have to be pragmatic about what can be expected of most people - rather than expecting most people to change their lifestyle. It’s sad, but I think we must be very pragmatic about this.”

“Well, it was a fantastic time, every year, it got a little better. I attended lectures not only at the Faculty of Science but also at the Faculty of Philosophy - lectures by Jan Patočka and Karel Kosík. We truly lived off of this, we also had somewhat of a community of youth in Jircháře. Both the Christian and non-Christian youth. We used to meet up there and invite people like Kosík or Ladislav Hejdánek. It was a time when things were really exciting, and it seemed that everything would only lead to something better. Then, unfortunately, that August of ’68 came, and that ended it for a while.”