Oldrich Slavík

“Back then, it had been like that if you wanted to go to college, you had to have a recommendation from a high school from which you graduated or from your employer. If you wanted to do evening or correspondence study. There had to be this recommendation by the former employer, as the all-seeing eye of the Communist party had to know everything. And as I didn´t have any of these I had to be recommended by this regiment commander, by the chief. So I would get my application form, they would send it to me, so I would just fill it, and I would ask the chief, as I would need a recommendation from to study at the college. And he would tell me: 'Comrade sergeant, have you considered joining the Communist Party?' And I would say: 'Well I didn´t.' And he said: 'Sure. 'So think about it and come back in two days. So I came back the day after and he would say: 'Well?' I learned Slovak while being there, as I like learning languages. And I would tell him: Comrade commander, I read in the Red Right daily (Rudé Právo) that the Communist Party is the foremost vanguard of the working class. And me, being just a twenty-year-old, I don´t feel like a vanguard.' And he went again: 'Sure, just think about it.' And I was in a hurry as the exams were getting near, so I came after two more days and he just went straight for it, saying: 'Well, comrade sergeant, if you would sign this paper, we would sign that paper of yours.' See? If I would sign my application for the Communist Party, they would recommend me to study at the university. My blood began to boil, I was thinking, 'Should I just refuse? That would have meant he would put me in jail for two weeks and there would be no recommendation. Then I got angry and began to think that if the Communist Party had to recruit new members by blackmailing them... Then I did indeed decide that I would rather finish that school and make money. So in the end, I signed the paper and went to Prague (Praha) to do the exams.”

“One day I found this police summons for a traffic violation while using a company car. It stated that I had to be at Bartolomějská street at a given day and hour. So I would come and produce my ID and they would lead me into this office which obviously hadn´t been used by anyone. There were no papers or anything like that, it was an office designated just for this kind of engagement. The man would introduce himself as Jarda Matěj, or Matějka or something like that. And I told him: 'I didn´t drive the car, the Japanese did.' And he told me: 'That´s not the point.' He threw away the paper and said: 'We just needed to make you come.' And he said he was – some Ministry of the Interior department, I can´t remember the exact number. And that he was offering me collaboration with them. And I would always take some risk in these situations, so I would say: 'You mean that if someone would say some good joke about Husák I had to report it immediately?' And he said: 'That´s not the point. As our department fights the external enemy.' And I was thinking that even I could relate to that, that I loved my country and I would like to suppress the external enemy. Maybe we both had a different idea as to who the enemy was. So he would produce these papers, this 'binding act' as they would call it, then, maybe so we could act like these true detective novel heroes, he made me to choose a codename, something they hadn´t used in regard to my person yet. And I got this idea that I could chose codename 'Lhoták', as I just didn´t care about them at all. So I would state that my codename was 'Lhoták'.”

“Every two years delegates could and maybe even had to go on a holiday in Czechoslovakia. On every even year. On an odd year you didn´t have to, so I spent holidays in Japan. In the summer of 1970, we came to Czechoslovakia, to Prague, and day after that, I went to see our general manager to give him a report. Back then, Štrougal was already gone, Luděk Kratochvíl was the manager. And we were friends of sorts, as I knew him before I went to Tokyo. It was in the morning, at 11AM or at 11:30AM maybe. I came in in quite a good mood, saying: 'Your ambassador from Tokyo at your service.' We shook hands and he said? 'Do you want cognac or whiskey?' I said: 'Sorry, too early for me.' He said: 'My offer still stands, you would like to.' So we talked for a while, just chatting. And after that, he just said: ' Let´s take a look at what kind of a whore you are'. He opened his drawer, provided some list of people and told me: 'You are a whore alright, but not so big after all. So your family would stay here and you would be recalled from Japan. When we would find replacement for you, you would go there with him. You would introduce him to our partners and teach him the ropes, then you would pack your things and come back. And that was how it went, but not until December 1970.”

“I didn´t hurt anyone. Not even without knowing, I hope. I didn´t hurt anyone, I didn´t talk rubbish about anyone or something like that. I didn´t help anyone to his early grave or so. So he would be forced to leave his job due to what I said. That just wasn´t the case. I knew that I had been playing by their rules to some extent. So I could do the job I enjoyed, which brought me money. But otherwise... I had no problem with that. I could face myself in a mirror anytime you like. I feel I didn´t do anything I should be ashamed of in this regard.”

“They would call me into this special room and there were two men who introduced themselves as secret servicemen. They said they read my dissertation on the machine tool production boom in the capitalist markets so they came to me to offer me an informant´s job. To ask me whether I wanted to work with them. I asked them what the conditions would be and so on. They said: 'Most of the time, you would work as an analyst abroad, at the United Nations or at the UN in Geneva and so on.' So I said, well, okay. And one of them said: 'You could also put your language skills to use while working there.' And they gave me this questionnaire, maybe thirty pages, so it took me about two hours. And the last question had been quite a clever one: 'State you opinion on topics we didn´t ask you about.' I found that quite clever. So I stated my opinion that under no conditions I would like to have anything to do with guns. They took the papers, came back after a week and said: 'We are very sorry, as we were looking forward working with you, but our chief human resources officer turned you down, as you had stated that you wouldn´t like to use a weapon. He stated that the service was difficult and no one could be allowed to dodge anything so he could drop out eventually.' So that was the end of my collaboration back then.”