Pavel Štěpán

“Then there were classic summons as well. The whole band would get a notice to show up for an interrogation at the local crime division in Jihlava. We would each spent half an hour there with them asking us classic stuff… Jihlava… Why are we doing this? Where have we seen that? Do we know what it means? That they are actually fascist symbols, the whole punk movement is fascist. The band Kiss, they always compared it to Kiss. The Kiss members, they, too, all think that they are rockers but they are, in fact, fascists, because they have that double ’S’ at the end. And they would take pictures of us, put us in the archives, and it never ended up being anything too serious. Usually it was really over in a half an hour. They took our pictures. We would tell them some nonsense, that we saw that stuff in a German magazine and that we actually have no idea what was going on, we would tell them this kind of rubbish. The problem was when State Security came from Brno, those guys were playing a different league and they knew very well what was going on, and they never believed this nonsense we told them.”

“Once those State Security guys slapped me so hard that I almost fell off my chair, that was because of these petitions, but otherwise they wouldn’t beat us with batons or anything like that… I know that a lot of other people from other towns had problems with that, that they would cut off their hair, the cops would take them to the station, cut off their mohawks, cut up their jackets with scissors, rip all those metal studs off. Every time those guys from, I don't know, from Příbram, from Prague, from Strakonice, when they came to Jihlava and got to meet the local police, they would say: ’You guys live in heaven on Earth, these Jihlava cops are so sweet compared to the other ones.’”