Zora Rysová

"I had a really funny experience with them. When I was working for the Central Bohemian [monument preservation], so sometime in 1980, I got a call from someone while I was at work, some guy, saying he needed to talk to me. I said, 'Yeah, come,' because I thought it was about a monument and he wanted to discuss it. I told him, 'Come, we're on the third or fourth floor,' or whichever one we were on, by the Railway Station Střed (Center) we had the offices. And he said, 'You know, I wouldn't like to go upstairs like that, could you come down? There's a café here, I'll wait for you here.' I said that it was no problem and I said to my colleagues, 'Some fool, he doesn't want to climb the stairs, I have to go down, so I'm going to the café to consult.' I came there and he was sitting there and he said, 'Do you know why you're here?' And I said, 'Well, you own a monument building,' and he stared and said, 'No.' And now he started to tell me how it is, this socialism, and how my friends, these Christian friends, and people like Zdeněk Neubauer, how they mean well. That they know it, comrades, but that my friends sometimes do things that are on the edge of the law, and they are not lawyers, they don't know, and they could get into trouble. And if I could be so kind as to make a liaison. That I'd go and tell them [State Security] what my friends were doing and they'd always say, 'But they can't do that anymore, that's dangerous, they'd be in conflict with the law,' and I'd tell the friends again and they wouldn't do it, would they. When I understood that, I laughed, probably like you, and I said, 'You can't be serious, really! Like I'm going to rat on my friends? No way!' So we parted."

"Sometime in March, I would say, my signature was published as far back as I can remember. At that time I used to go to Řepčice in North Bohemia, where those houses were, to Viktor Parkán. And now there was the Charter and there was an opportunity to sign it, so I reflected that since there were about 200 people at the beginning, that 200 people would be easy to bother, but the more there were, the more difficult it would be for them [State Security]. So you need as many people as possible. When the opportunity was there, Viktor or somebody told me that all I had to do was to write a piece of paper on which I would write, 'I agree with the declaration of Charter 77', put my birth date, my name, my address, and give it to somebody in Prague who would hand it over. And I know I carried it in my waller for a few weeks before I met someone. Probably Svát'a Karásek, who used to wash windows in Vodičkova Street, I don't know if he was there then, but I sent it through Svát'a. I gave it to him and then he passed it on to someone. That was sometime in February, March."

"Then it was 1968, everything looked great, censorship and all just cool. And even my friend set up a seasonal job of picking strawberries in England. So, I arrived in England, I was there, I left on 7 August and my mother told me, 'If something happens with the Russians, do not come back.' I said, "With the Russians, right? What could possibly happen? They're in Russia, we're here." It was the night of 20 August, I was returning, I arrived in London from the brigade and on the twenty-first I was to take a train to Bohemia, so I came to London on the twentieth, of course I had nowhere to sleep there was a train, so I was walking there at night, and in the morning, when there was light, I saw the newspaper sellers opening... and so it was written: 'Prague, Bohemia, tanks' and there were photos. I said, 'No, it cannot be true.' And I don't know. And there was the occupation and the invasion and the headlines. And I said, 'No, no, no, I'm going home and I'll tell my mom I didn't know anything.' Suddenly it was clear to me, because she told me what to do and I didn't want to, I wanted to go home. I got on that train, I met a girl there, we went through the whole train and we were the only ones. Two Czechs taking that very train, and she told me that the border with Germany was closed and we would reach the German border, and that we would wait there for two or three days or we didn't know how long before we could continue. But that the Germans are kind, that they would feed us, that I don't have to be afraid, so I said, 'No, no, no, I really do not want to stay in Germany; We were very anti-German, at the end of the war propaganda, Germany was really bad for us. So I got out, so did she, and I came back and stayed in England for a year more."

"When I finished ninth grade in 1962, I wanted to go - or my parents wanted me - to go to a secondary school here in Dobříš like a grammar school, then it was SVVŠ. So I applied and they invited me to an interview. A lot of people was accepted straight away and others were checked on. And I went for an interview, I managed everything quite well. And then they showed me a piece of paper and the commission stated: ´Well, your marks are sufficient, your replies are good too.´ But despite this, across the report it was written in red from the National Committee: 'Not recommended for studies.' So my Dad received the negative reply stating that it I was not accepted to the secondary school, and had to go to the field of agriculture, because my grandfather was a kulak. My two older sisters managed to escape having to work hard in the field; it was a rather hard work in the sun, manual work back then. So they were looking for people and chasing them in. That is why my dad went to the doctor, who wrote him a confirmation that I was a sick child and that farming would not be suitable for me yet. So I was postponed and could go to the secondary school under the condition that I´d study agriculture later or I'd go to work in a cooperative farm in three years. After the three years, meaning in 1965, everything was quite different. No one mentioned that I should go to agriculture. I applied at the Faculty of Civil Engineering and got admitted without any problem at all."