Olga Stankovičová

“One day an incredible thing happened to me: I was summoned to the police station because of a matter with our car. I argued with them so fiercely that they placed me in the preliminary detention cell, which was for unruly prisoners. I had emptied everything from my handbag, but as I was sitting there behind the bars I found out that I had these brass knuckles in my handbag. It scared me because if they found out I had this with me, they could have really crunched me for that and kept me right there. I was thinking hard what to do with it. Luckily – right next to Bartolomějská Street, where the police station was, there was a good butcher’s shop, and I had bought a beef spleen there for our dog. I wrapped the brass knuckles with the spleen, thinking that if they detained me, I would ask them to put the meat into the fridge for me. It was clear to me that they would not open the packet with the meat. So I thus kept those brass knuckles concealed in beef spleen for about four hours.”

“I was regularly copying it at work and everybody knew that I was doing it. All my colleagues treated me wonderfully. We were afraid of house searches, and therefore I kept our archive at our friends’ place. Only one house search took place in our home and we were the only Charter 77 signatories where the search yielded no results at all. It was unbelievable, but they didn't found a single paper in my home because I kept all the documents at work. But one day, it was a Friday, I decided that I could no longer store it at work because recently firemen had begun appearing there; they were constantly checking storage rooms, and I was afraid that they were secret police agents, which they probably were. I took everything home, the bag full of documents was very heavy, and this is what happened: as I was on my way home, I stopped in a shop on the other side of the street to buy some meat, and I intended to put the bag into our Trabant car which was parked behind the house in Melantrichova Street, and later take the documents away. As I was going up the stairs, I met two gentlemen who said to me: ´Secret Police. You are Mrs. Stankovičová, aren’t you? We’re going to conduct a house search in your apartment.´ I suspected that they had followed me all the way home and that they knew that I had the documents in the bag. The bag weighted about fifteen kilos. I thought they knew that I had carried all the materials inside. I put the bag down in our miniature kitchen, which was just one metre seventy by one metre sixty-five, and I left the meat on top of the bag, because we didn’t have a fridge at that time. I staggered into the room where my husband was sitting, carefree, because he knew that we didn’t have any documents at home… I remember this house search was done after the document about the writers was issued. Havel had been there the day before, and the addresses had been written in our house. The StB policemen were searching the apartment and they didn’t know that I had it all in that bag. It was a huge bag, and the meat was placed on top, and it looked as if I had come from a shop… They conducted the house search, they even checked the carbon papers against the light to see if something was written on them, but they didn’t find anything at all. After an hour they stopped; they took my husband with them. One of the StB agents even brought me water, because I was sitting there pale as a ghost, and I felt as if I was going to faint. I thought: they leave it for the end. They will eventually come to the kitchen, find the bag there and carry it away triumphantly. The policeman told me: ´You are not feeling well, right?´ I said: ´No, I’m not.´ - ´I will bring you some water.´ And so the policeman nearly saved me from fainting, and then they finished the house search and began signing the protocol where they stated that nothing was found.”

“In my view, Charter 77 was one of many documents that we signed, as we had begun signing petitions in 1976 in relation to the Plastic People case. Even the StB visited us for the first time as early as 1976. During the time of their trial, Juliána Jirousová lived downstairs from us in a separate room. We were not there at the court, but the StB came to us and they took my husband Andrej with them. They examined fingerprints on our typewriter. At that time we didn’t pay much attention to it. But we were drawn in, as Nikolaj (Andrej) said, because we were friends with so many people that it was impossible to take any other stance toward it than the most resolute one. We would have signed the Charter at the end of 1976, obviously, in the first wave of signatories, but the people who came to collect the signatures arrived to our place a quarter of an hour after we had left for the railway station and rode to the Highlands. My husband thus signed Charter 77 in the second wave of signatories. I wanted to sign it too, but he objected to it, arguing that wives were usually not signing it. But I forced my way into the third wave, insisting that this was not possible and that I would not stand the wait. When that insane propaganda appeared in the press, I felt such an adrenaline rush that I wanted to sign it at all costs, and I eventually did. But other signatures followed and nothing was happening. I found out that Dana Němcová, who was gathering the signatures, had taken my name out– because I was a woman, a wife, who had to provide for her husband. But I forced my way among them once again, and just like the ´dvuzhdyi geroy Sovetskogo soyuza,´ the hero of the Soviet union, I became the hero signatory of Charter 77.”

“Nikolaj (Andrej Stankovič) was employed as a night-watchman in Jižní Město at that time. It was a construction material depot and he discovered that large-scale stealing was probably underway there. There were unregistered vehicles arriving there and carrying something out in the evenings. Since he knew that as a Charter signatory, he was very vulnerable. Just to be safe he kept writing down the the licence plate numbers of the cars that were coming there when he was on duty. The StB called his co-workers and they gave him a beating when he came there. Unfortunately he was holding a typewriter in one hand and a briefcase in the other, and so he had no chance of defending himself. In a flash, he found himself on the ground. He then went to report for sick leave because he had bruises on his body. Suzanne Hejdová, who lived nearby in Jižní Město, testified for him. But the company doctor said: ´The bruises will just disappear by themselves…( the company name was IPB or IPS, I think, which stood for Industrial Construction or something like that) so he went to see a psychologist in the psychiatric department who wrote a confirmation for him, attesting that he was unable to work. He was thus on a sick leave and it was obvious that he couldn’t return to work. Meanwhile he submitted a complaint demanding investigation of the incident. Then, during Brezhnev’s visit to Czechoslovakia or on some similar occasion, they came to arrest him. It was six o’clock in the morning and we refused to open the door. At that time, there was scaffolding around our house, and they climbed on this scaffolding and banged on our window, and we simply told them that we had no reason to open the door for them. My husband was on a sick leave and I was about to go to work. It was around seven o’clock when they kicked out our door by force. It was a violent blow and the two-winged door was ripped from the doorjambs. They announced that they were here to arrest Mr. Stankovič. Mr. Stankovič said that he was on sick leave and therefore he was not allowed to leave the apartment. They discussed it for a long time and then they arrested him in his funny-looking striped orange pyjamas and barefooted. He refused to change, arguing that he was on sick leave. They dragged him down onto the street. I managed to throw his slippers out from the window for him. Obviously, later I also filed a complaint for housebreaking and the damage they caused to the door. I had to have the door repaired and I wasn’t able to leave the apartment because of it until it was done. I have to say that the criminal police, where I reported it as forcible trespass, treated me very nicely. They promised to investigate it and then during a telephone call they stressed: ´This was not done by our department.´ The State Police was present during the investigation, but over public phone they really admitted to me that ´it was done by another department, and we are sorry for it,´ which I really appreciated.”