Mgr. Jan Šícha

“The demonstration was political, and I would even say that it was internally unfree because a very common rally cry was: ‘Don’t break the procession!’ every time someone wanted to go home. And that annoyed me because it was clear they were going to beat up everyone eventually and it was clear that many people had attended because it had been an authorized demonstration. So, keeping them in the procession by forcing them not to leave, that really annoyed me back then.”

“I was in Prague when they took the Germans out of the embassy, put them in cars and then the police dispersed the thing. They brought the East Germans in groups from the embassy down to the stinking Ikarus buses in Karmelitská street. It was all surrounded by a police cordon. I witnessed this typical incident there, when an old man with a stick told them he lived there and asked them to let him go. So they let him in front of the cordon and he started dancing and shouting with the stick over his head: ‘Es lebt die Freiheit’ [Long live freedom] and they punched him with a baton and pulled him away. Then the bus doors closed. There were armored personnel carriers there with blades at the front and also a few police cars. The buses left and all that was left was the stink. Those who stayed got beaten up. I felt like it was a metaphor of what was going to happen with us. That those East Germans and especially the beautiful East German ladies would fly away to their free brothers and we would be left here with the Bolsheviks to rot.”

“Perestroika didn’t exist. We had this conversation about perestroika with professor Michovský who had made a textbook about Greece and Rome for sixth graders that I really liked. And he invited us, students, for coffee and told us to read newspaper, especially Russian newspaper because the year 1968 was repeating itself and things had started moving. We looked at him with skepticism. What was happening in Ústí was completely irrelevant because the regional secretary Šípek ruled the place and he was a Stalinist, body and soul. And the things happening around the country were not enough to bring out any hopes or expectations in us. We were ready for a degraded life. For not having any political power, being locked up and whenever someone talked about the possibility of emigration, I told them that no one was interested in us. We grew up in lousy clothes, we studied terrible schools, I told them that no one in the West would be interested in us. Today I know that a twenty-two-year-old white man is always a catch. He can make a career.”

“We managed to get in, but given my studies at the faculty of pedagogy, I didn’t want to get kicked out, which is why I didn’t really manage the transition to the red line when you start telling everyone loud and clear. We were going to some reading of Ivan Wernisch to a farm near Chomutov and I remember thinking in the train that we would get arrested, I’d get kicked out of school and it would finally be over. But the event didn’t take place eventually because Wernisch didn’t show up and instead we got terribly drunk in someone’s apartment. During socialism, one had an awful lot of feelings that were actually self-generated. The fear was omnipresent. I only stopped being afraid like two years after the revolution. It was like a residual fear. It wasn’t justified by anything. It was just something that you had deep under your skin. The dissent was this magical land of freedom that I was not able to fully enter, yet I had some kind of a ritualized, literary and cultural contact with it. And when I look back at it, my life could have been spent a little bit differently.”

“We lived close by the bridge from which Germans had been thrown down during the massacre in Ústí. That was one of my first information about history. They threw people off the bridge and shot at them. My grandmother’s sister Růža told us about it. She was Czech but had some dresses with white stripes and because of that they thought she was German. They were pulling her on the handrail already, but she shouted them in Czech so credibly that they let her go and told her to get lost. My perception of what happened in Ústí and of what the borderlands actually were was probably different than of those who came there later but no one really talked about it much. That grandpa was German, that we talked about. I found his stamps, seals, business cards and such. They explained to me how the Schicht factory had worked before it had been taken over by the proletariat. But the situation, the outside reality, that was the same for everyone.”