Mgr. Jiří Růžička

"First of all, I got the feeling from it that they really must not get away with this anymore. And one thing I took away from it, which haunted me for a long time, was the fear of the crowd. I took from the way we were packed in, the people were squeezing in and trying to get away, and that fear was there too - now the other side, the cops, there behaving the way they were behaving - so I was then for months, long months, I was afraid to approach a group where there were several people. Really. It looks funny, but it was like that. I know that then there was St. Nicholas, so cheerful on the Charles Bridge on that 5th of December. He said come and see, so we went there. When I saw the crowd of people on that bridge, I got absolutely terrified and I ran away. Because that in me, that feeling of fear, was there for a very long time."

"But then there was one extremely powerful moment, and that was January 1969, when Palach burned himself to death. And I know that it affected us as a generation incredibly. We really went through all the events around that. I still remember the endless queue to Karolinum where we were. That's where our relationship to the regime, to what the regime represented, was formed. It shaped - at least I think for me - in a very negative sense. And then came the first anniversary of August. Now, whenever I look into Krakovska, just a little bit away from here, it makes a spark in me. Because we were in Wenceslas Square on 21 August and a mad scramble started there, because they - Public Security - wanted to push us out. But what was by far the worst - suddenly the People's Militia, the army, was standing by their side. Not like the Russians in the '80s, but Czech people, policemen, army, militiamen. And now, I'll go back to the Krakovska, they pushed us into the Krakovska street, and there they wanted to strangle us and do something to us, I think, and they used the fact that they were shooting tear grenades there. We were there - a lot, there were an awful lot of people there, and we picked them up again and threw them back at them. And this all took place on the edge of that Krakovská Street. Then we ran off somewhere, and fortunately nobody arrested us. But it was a year after that, and suddenly I realized how the time was actually going somewhere, or the society was going into the abyss."

"I had a night shift from August 20 to 21 and there was some noise all night. There's always noise in that factory, but there's another noise. Well, in the morning I came to the dressing room, at that quarter to six, that I was going to take a shower and go home, and there were hundreds of people in that dressing room, and nobody was changing. I was like, 'What's going on?' Because there weren't any cell phones and internet back then, and they said this is what happened, the Russians are here. So I went home to this Vinohrady, my mom was working in a kindergarten. Now we didn't believe our ears and that it was possible and the radio and everything... And they immediately withdrew one of their kindergarten classes from a school in the countryside somewhere. And we, with this Honza Cígler and others, Borek Šedivec - a sensational downhill skier who lived not far from us - so when the bus full of those children arrived and those parents were at work, we each took a few children and we took them to the parents' work to have them, those children, at home. So that first day is incredibly memorable to me in that way. I was living in Vinohrady by the Orion, so I took my camera and we went to the radio station. So that's where what was going on. I recently did one exhibition of photographs from the '80s that I took there, and I'm actually amazed today at how incredibly authentic and - I'll use that term again - formative it is. How it completely shifted my life somewhere. We probably all succumbed to this idea of socialism with a human face back then, especially the young ones, and believed that it was reformable. And when the Russians came along, I at least became incredibly bitter and hardened. And I understood that this was not the way to go."

"My generation had the incredible good fortune to come of age in the 1960s, at a time that was extremely important to us. Fifty-three years ago, when we were fifteen or sixteen, we started to break through Radio Luxembourg and others, or some lucky people had a record or something on tape. So we listened to that, of course. Or very limited listening. And then small-format theatres started to appear here - or simultaneously, I don't say sooner later. Not only Semafor. But Semafor, that was just a phenomenon for me and my friends. The Semafor theatre, it was something that shaped me - I've used it several times - but the Semafor, definitely, and a lot. What Suchý and Šlitr were doing, I was just blown away by it. My friends and I used to imitate it, we did some of their sketches and we enjoyed it. Just Jiří Suchý, he was an absolutely unattainable idol for me. Not only mine, but of that time."