Pavel Sivko

"A press centre was created at Mánes, where people began to bring papers, posters were painted there, and there were shifts where people would come in, work there as long as they could, and then change again." – "Did you help out there too?" – "Yes. But that was a matter of course, I do not brag about that. There were a lot of people there. Of course, we learned afterwards that most of the people who organized us there were the former members of State Security – those artists who were engaged directly as agents. I cannot say that in that spontaneity anyone could have organized anything for us, but it was interesting that they were the ones who became the spokespeople and they went to negotiate. And we trusted them."

"When I saw what kind of people were signing it, what kind of calibre, I thought, I am some little illustrator, graphic artist, so who would care about me? But I was persuaded that I should sign it. That the people who did not sign it would not get jobs and I do not know what. All it took was a few phone calls and you do not have to get the job. So, a strange situation arose where I started to be persuaded by those closest to me. My wife was pregnant. My family started pressuring me that Jitka was pregnant and I was the sole breadwinner and I had to do something about it. They were quite conformist in their relationship with the regime and I signed under that pressure. In a kind of last, ninth wave that still came out. They always published in Rudé právo who had signed it, and then it was a cloud of names, and I thought I was going to get lost in it. So, I signed it. To this day I still feel it as a kind of defeat."

"I felt it mostly through my dad. He signed Two Thousand Words and got banned that morning. Even the books that were finished, they went to the crusher. But he lived by those books and illustrations. And suddenly it was taken away from him. He started making ceramic walls for a living. He learned ceramics and started doing something completely different, which I admire on the one hand. Sure, he drew and did lithography at home, but he could not do those things anymore."

"Eventually the troops and all that, they withdrew, we observed that in the Weeklies and then when we arrived in Prague. They withdrew from the cities. But it was not so much the troops that were terrible as it was the way the people began to change. How suddenly some of them started to act according the proverb “Near is my kirtle, but nearer is my smock'. Suddenly they had a chance to get into some positions. And it was pretty quick. It surprised me how the society quickly pulled back from some excitement and pull tail down and there was silence. That was pretty scary."

"When I was in that high school in the 1960s, there was a loosening up. There was literature, movies came to us, absolute theatre started, the Theatre on the Balustrade, The Drama Club, the youth cinema, where suddenly we could see films that had not been available before. It was such an artistic, cultural, social thaw. Then we considered it normal, thinking that beautiful times would come, that society would finally cleanse itself and be about something else... And then August came. A bash, as they say."