Ruth Šormová

"The experience in England taken into account, it is a sad, sad comparison. The clients here were not even called clients. They were some kind of inmates. They were perceived, even by the professional system, as people of a different level. They were treated as objects of care. They didn't have the slightest chance to determine for themselves what they wanted. Of course, there were exceptions, and there were people working in institutions who wanted to do it well and treated them well, but at the same time the system was very much in the wrong. They were simply objects of care, not equal human beings. It was hard to change it. They were very much confined behind the walls of homes or institutions, they didn't even call them homes then, just institutions. They were in absolutely minimal contact with their families."

"My second trip back from England ended up with a strong experience on the train. In the compartment with me was an old gentleman who was returning from Germany from his son who had emigrated. As a present he was bringing a large packet of washing powder - Persil, something that didn´t exist here. Today it looks like situation from outer space. At the border, the bastards spilt the several-kilogram package on the floor of the compartment to see if he was hiding anything. He was such a handsome old man, in his 80s. He was crying. That was a horrible end of the trip for me."

“We spent the first weeks in Soběslav. During the first two weeks we went to Prague a couple of times to participate in protests but otherwise we tried to stay in Soběslav. Because of that and because of the fact that previously, too, the parish had been a meeting point for people who were interested in the tensions in the regime, the parish quite naturally became a centre for exchanging information. People would come to get information and if someone wanted to bring something into Soběslav they would contact us. Right after the Sunday service Zdeněk told people in the church about what had happened. The news had already been spreading through the free foreign broadcast services so a lot of people already knew from Voice of America or from Radio Free Europe. A day or two later people began to ask us if we knew more. We were there and so we could talk about it. People spontaneously started bringing candles to the parish, there was this one spot. There were talks about a student who'd been killed, about violence. Someone put a tricolour at the spot, someone put a candle there, and then someone broke our window with a rock. All of this was there. Those were intense weeks and then, when Civic Forum was created, the first place in Soběslav was at ours, naturally. We had only been living in Soběslav for a short time, a year or so. We were simply not locals and we didn't know the particularities of the local culture very much, which was an advantage in some ways, and obviously a disadvantage in other ways. But I think it was more of an advantage, because we were slightly distanced from the local tensions. The revolution was underway in a very intense way in November and in December, until the presidential election. But from January people started focusing on regional issues a lot. They sometimes wanted to sort out various old wrongs and personal interests. It was a little hard to navigate through that and to prevent it from turning into something else. It was probably for the best that we were young and that we came from elsewhere. That we were not involved in the conflicts. So we did keep our distance a little bit, I hope.”

“In 1989 I wanted to participate in the Jan Palach Week but two days before that someone rang the doorbell at five to six. State Security. They took my passport and detained me. First I was interrogated in Tábor, then in a preliminary detention cell right in Soběslav. The local policemen were completely baffled because they had never seen anything like that and felt a little awkward about it. They were just regular policemen. I spent 48 hours there with the excuse being that I was preliminarily detained so that I wouldn't go to a protest in Prague. When they let me go after those 48 hours at five in the morning, I made 20 steps and was detained again for an additional 48 hours. At 22, in a small town, that was hard. During the body search there was a lady that I knew from the shop. It was abnormal and terrible in a personal sense as well. There were people that I continued to meet under other circumstances for years. My husband kept calling, he was trying to bring me some food. He even smuggled messages inside a book, written with a pencil, but it was so dark in there that I never noticed. I completely missed it. That’s also what it could look like in a small town.”

“We had several types of activities. At that time, we worked a lot with people both from Charter 77 and from VONS, because the reaction to (the founding of the Independent Association for Peace – ed. note) was quick and powerful. Not only were we all subjected to pressure in the form of repeated interrogations, but some of our friends from the IAP would end up in prison. It was unpleasant, our courage was constantly challenged. Had it happened ten years later I would have perceived it even more dramatically. At the time we managed to pull through more easily. We organized a meeting of IAP members near Česká Lípa, there were around two hundred of us in the whole republic. It was clearly impossible to prepare that in secret but we tried. We met at an outpost in the woods. It was presented as a Scouting cottage except it had nothing to do with Scouts. Most people never made it there because they were caught while on the way already. We who managed to arrive went inside the cottage with enthusiasm. We talked for a short while. We decided to go out to talk in the forest. And suddenly a militiaman showed up behind every tenth tree. There were fifteen or twenty of us and a hundred armed militiamen. It was absurd, but it does represent the era. It was difficult because it meant interrogations at some regional station, which was more unpleasant than in Prague. They let me out at half past two in the morning, dropped me off somewhere, and I had no idea where I was. I had to look for a train station. It could have this sort of consequences, too.”