Jindřich Šídlo

“Of course, I was not attacked, I only appeared there once. Now I don't know if it was Wednesday or Friday, well one of those days when the actions were very sharp. We went there, I think it was Friday, after school to have a look. Of course, our parents weren't allowed to know about it because they would have banned us, we were only sixteen, right. And I didn't see the intervention directly with my own eyes, because we are at the moment when the policemen or state police with those white shields and white helmets, they were nicknamed smurfs, by the way, according to the then very popular series on Czechoslovak TV, when they started to approach, so we ran away. The fact that the interventions were extremely harsh and illegal, often completely brutal, we learned gradually, on the one hand, from the radio stations and, of course, it was also written about in the Lidové noviny. But we found out about three weeks later.”

“And your uncle had a gallery. Have you attended any of his cultural events or do you remember one?" - "Sure, of course. He was or is the husband of my mother's sister, Zdenek Hůla, an academic sculptor. By the way, for example, the author of the monument in Lety near Písek, as a very important figure. And they and their brother had the first and only private gallery in the Czech Republic. Gallery H in Kostelec nad Černými lesy. So, I think from that end... people used to go there regularly, because such social and cultural events took place there, regular meetings, openings. It was the place where I saw Several Sentences for the first time, in June 1989. By the way, the events still take place there today, even though the gallery is actually no longer there, or not in the form it was in. So, at one time it was a very important place of fine arts and, I would say, of social life as well. I remember, for example, I was there at Christmas 1989, and the French ambassador was visiting at that time.”