Karel Šírek

“The last time I was arrested was on 31 October ’89; nowadays people say it was all clear [about the upcoming revolution - trans.] by then, but I was interrogated for twelve hours, and I had no sense of clarity at all. So it wasn’t - it was more just a fluke... We didn’t think of what we did as being against the state, we didn’t really fight the system, we couldn’t give tuppence about the system. We wanted the system to give us a break so we could do what we wanted to.”

“When State Security started coming there, they let it be anyway. They’d take me from work, for instance. I would come to work in the morning, and they’d call me into his office, which looked similar. There were two blokes sitting by the side there, and he said: ‘These comrades here,’ he spoke with me informally, ‘they’ve come for you, Karel, they want to ask you something.’ So we sat there for half an hour, the comrades didn’t say anything, then they said they’d take me away. I said we were leaving for Slovakia at ten. They said: ‘We’ll see about that.’ They released me at eight in the evening, so no I didn’t. And when I came to work the next day, he asked me what had happened. I just told him he probably wouldn’t understand it and that it was better that way, and he let it be again.”