Josef Rössler

“All of the buses from the pub in Postupice suddenly stopped, the cops chased us out, checked our ID. I still reckoned it was no big deal, eh, just the cops playing up. Around that time they had already started forming a database. Still nothing happened to me, I guess I still wasn’t interesting enough to them, so then in seventy-six, after Bojanovice, when the arrests began, I lived in the fear of when it would be my turn to be interrogated, but still nothing happened. I guess I still wasn’t quite important enough to them.”

“I already described this first experience of mine somewhere, perhaps it’s even in my book, that it was like a revelation. Because of course, when they began to play, I sat down on the stairs so as not to disturb, because Mejla didn’t like it much when someone else attended the rehearsal, but I gaped at them because I’d never heard music like that in my life. I was completely taken away. And it occurred to me: “Damn, I’d like to play with them sometime.’”

“The one stetsec [State Security officer - trans.] said: ‘Such a trifle, you disappoint me, I thought goodness knows what...’ They really expected to find some seditious activity [and they found marihuana - ed.]. True enough, they did rustle up some foreign magazines that I had there, a letter by Václav Havel, that was in seventy.´-six, the Plastics were already locked up by then. And now they wanted me to collaborate, otherwise they said they’d hand it over to the criminal [police], the weed. I was completely dazed after the whole day, so I reckoned the only thing important to me at that moment was to get out of there. So I signed it, the collaboration, and they started giving me instructions, which way I should go home, what I should do. I came out of the house and said to myself: ‘You ass, now you can just about go jump under a train.’ So I first went to the pub, where they had draught Krušovice, there were some boys sitting there who said: ‘You look a bit green.’ I was completely out of it, and as I walked back home, I reckoned: ‘This won’t do, this just won’t do.’ So I went to Dana Němcová in Ječná [Street], and I puked out the whole story to her. She said: ‘So we’ll spread the word everywhere that you signed it, and they’ll find out, and then you’ll see what they do with you.”