Helena Sosnová

"Were you scared?" - "I was never scared because I took my decision as the best decision of my life and that I hadn't done anything to anybody, I hadn't done anything wrong, so basically I was calm." - "Were you threatened in any way by the StB?" - "They physically assaulted me several times too. And they threatened me a lot." - "What did they threaten you with?" - "That they would destroy me, and my family, although I didn't have those siblings, but I was worried about my parents and my grandmother, what might happen. But then it was more the physical assault that came into it, where if I didn't testify, it would enrage them to the point that they would then actually start slapping me or hurting me in some way like that." - "So they slapped you and what else did they do to you?" - "For example, when they brought us in for questioning, they brought in a colleague, we had to strip naked, do squats, if anything... That kind of dehumanizing stuff."

"In the third year, then, we signed the charter. After the others signed the Anti-Charter, I actually became interested in the document against which the signatures were collected. So I managed to get it. I was completely attracted by the wording of the Charter, where it referred to human rights and responsible civil society, so without thinking long about what might happen, what might happen afterwards, I signed it out of my own conviction. Even though, for example, we were warned that, girls, graduate first, then you [should sign]. But to me it just seemed like, the waiting to graduate, it just seemed like I was already thinking too much about it and it just wouldn't be the way I felt. From the heart."