Jarmila Stibicová

"My jsme s manželem šli jakoby na to večer do divadla, avšak při východu z Myší díry nás přepadli estébáci mě chtěli jako zatknout, už jsme se vyloženě fyzicky bránili, volala o pomoc, ale lidi se báli, nikdo nepřišel, byla jich většina, nacpali nás do auta a ji zatkli, takže já jsem v tom divadle nebyla, protože jsem byla zadržená, a tak jako to v tom posledním období bylo běžný, že vás dali do cely předběžného zadržení (CPZ), takže jsem tu noc strávila na CéPéZetce."

"S mou kamarádkou, s kterou jsme seděly v lavici, tak jsme se rozhodly, že nebudeme brečet, ale že z toho poslechu uděláme takovou frašku. Tenkrát nebyly ještě propisky, byl inkoust v kalamářích, tak já jsem vylila ten inkoust na tu lavici a teď jsem řekla, musíme to dát do pořádku, vždyť bysme neměly kde sedět, čili jsme tam běhaly pořád s kbelíkem, hadrem a koštětem a snažily jsme se ten akt zneváží. Ale když začal Gottwald říkat slibuji na svoji čest a svědomí, tak to jsme už nezvládly ani my s Franckou a otočily jsme se zády a brečely taky."

“And what I considered the most important was to give the youth orientation. So they could make sense of things a bit. So for instance we made an expedition to Mr Havel at Hrádeček. For the young people, it was quite the experience, of course. Me, whenever I went to Hrádeček, I was always like Little Red Riding Hood with her mushroom basket, and I was mushroom picking as if, and all that. Otherwise, we had a number of larger events that we organised here. For example the hunger strike, that was when they arrested Stanislav Devátý, so we did that for Standa Devátý. And basically, we had regular meetings with the Charter speakers. We always had a Charter speaker over here, that would be Petr Uhl, Hradilek, Litomiský, Lenka Marečková, Saša Vondra. And the bigger events, that would be organising the hunger strike. That time we met in a pub under the pretence of a birthday party. They came on us there and took us away. It was on a Sunday and they didn’t have any woman employee at the police station, and it has to be a woman who does the body check, so they took me to the jail, and I saw there that the conditions, the handling was much rougher than at the StB (State Security = the police - transl.). State Security had some respect, because they knew that I knew my rights pretty much, and that I’d always send a complaint to the Office of Government and to the Ministry of Interior Inspection. But this time they used a lady who, as I found out later when heading the personnel changes at the jail, was sadistically inclined, so she disregarded me telling her I was still recovering from a gynaecological operation, and had me standing naked on concrete, and she used physical violence to force me into a prison check-up - doing knee-bends with my legs spread apart, naked, where they inspected the rectum and so on.”

“Well, simply, it meant that they’d pick you up on the street somewhere and take you in. So what it meant basically was that when you left the house, you never knew whether you'd come back again. So especially in the later days the pressure increased. But basically all they did was to pick you up and keep you for a while, so it wasn’t all that... Of course, they tried all sorts of tricks, so for instance when I tried to hide away from them variously, so they wouldn’t know about me and so I could go somewhere, then they would try - for instance, to visit my granddaughter at nursery school and ask her where Grandma was. Or they’d ask my nephews who lived in Prague, they asked what Auntie would bring them. They pretty much pulled in the whole wide (group of people). But my nephews specifically, they were the sort of boys, they took it in a romantic kind of way, and they were even agreed that if someone would stop them like that, they’d throw something through the window. For them, it was boyishly romantic.”

“What (the State Security agents) tried, Operation Sanitation (Asanace), to get us to move, yeah. But otherwise, to recruit someone, for that they knew that... I used a specific style with them - that they’re beneath me, I would refuse to testify - that was obvious from the start, they didn’t even try. All they wanted was for us to move, they offered that with the aside that if we don’t move, we have to count on the situation getting worse - which did in fact happen, that (the interest from State Security) increased. In the period (before) 1989 there was a lot of that, but on the other hand people stopped being afraid. I don’t know if I already said it - beforehand, people were afraid to sign certain things, and already with Several Sentences (Několik vět, a famous 1989 manifesto - transl.), people were actually coming to me saying they wanted to sign it. The situation changed. When it was Palach Week, then the Sunday afterwards they declared the national pilgrimage to Všetaty. I wasn’t at home then of course. I tried to get there. And I did even get to Všetaty, and there they picked us off one by one - they picked me up at the train station, tucked me into the buses. You probably know the story how they took us to the UAC (united agricultural co-op), from the UAC into a forest, and there they dropped us off. It was somewhere in a forest near Stará Boleslav. I know that in the police car with me were Ján Černogurský, John Bok, even someone from the Hejdáneks, Petra I think. I had a bouquet with me with the tricolour for the Pardubice district. Well I didn’t give them that, they let me keep it, so the next day... We came out from the forest into Stará Boleslav. We knew that it’s just over the bridge to Brandejs. We stopped a bus driver, and when we told him the cops took us into the forest, he said: ‘Yeah, you don’t have to pay anything, I’ll take you.’ People were starting to be decent to us. And then in Pardubice, when I came back, we just phoned up all our acquaintances and we got in touch with the Catholics. There’s an afternoon mass at 6 p.m. at the Bartholomew church, and the priest will celebrate the mass on Palach’s behalf. In the end he didn’t dare say it was for Jan Palach, but he said it was for our martyr Jan. Well, everyone knew of course. I brought the bouquet there, placed it on the altar. I went to have a look there the next day, the bouquet was still there, but the tricolour was gone though.”

“Well, it was me and my husband, then there was Zdeněk Ingr, you probably know his case, so I won’t go there, because the thing was that he was listed, and then Zbyněk Čeřovský came along. I don’t know if that name means anything to you, he was a soldier by profession, a pilot who had been kicked out (of the army). He’d been in Čáslav beforehand, but his wife had been here the whole time. We didn’t get in touch with him until a bit later. Also, I think he didn’t sign the Charter straight away, but a bit later. Pretty much that was the lot. More people joined in bit by bit. But thing is that although we didn’t have chartists here, we had people who were in touch with us, in other words there was a lot of activity here. Mainly, the resistance here was made up of three parts, like it was everywhere. The most numerous was the ‘underground’ (a Western oriented, music-based alternative social youth movement - transl.), the underground youth. Not just the underground, but the youth in general, because those people were interested in literature etcetera. So those were the main activities: publications both foreign, that is Svědectví (Testimony) and so on, that was of some standing of course, and then there was quite a bit more stuff, Listy (The Papers) and so on, and then the domestic publications, the so-called Infoch, then later on Lidovky (a famous pre-WW2 newspaper - transl.), then the petition activity, that means collecting signatures. A number of people from the independent intelligentsia were active in that - and it all worked along the snowball principle. I didn’t even know how far it reached, because it wouldn’t have actually been good to know too much. Everyone took that on their own responsibility. Well, and then of course fiction and factual literature. Those were various sources, direct sources, indirect sources. Because of course I was in contact with the people from Prague, well, I was most in touch with Anička Šabatová and Petr Uhl, then with Ruda Zeman, who was editor-in-chief of Lidovky besides Jiří Ruml. That was the second group. And later on another group came along, and those were people from the Churches. That was mostly in the last time period And right toward the end, those were the ecologists, and that spread quite a bit too, a lot actually. Those were my former students for instance, and bit by bit, just like the underground, they started with ecology, and because of how they were persecuted, they came closer to politics. So that was the same. Of course, by the Churches, I don’t mean people who were in it from the start, like Šimsa, Mezník. We had a lot of contacts in Brno, as we didn’t just visit the apartment workshops at the Hejdáneks in Prague, but also in Brno, that varied, at professor Komárková, at the Šimsas and so on.”

“For one thing it was legal help, for another it was help to the families, both material, as it sometimes happened that the family ended up without any means, and also legal (help) in the prison, exactly, the protection of physically weaker individuals by physically stronger ones as if. And the main thing was that these cases received publicity. There were many cases, I don’t remember them all. I know that there were several people from Semtín who had it like that, and then when they were released from prison, they came to me to say thank you. That it really meant something, that they could tell how (the guards) treated them more decently in prison, they couldn’t take liberties. It was typical that it was different if we didn’t get to hear of the case, because the family was maybe afraid to contact us, they acted as if nothing was happening, and so those people were unprotected and they had it tough in jail. (Unlike) those people who we knew about, who were taken by Amnesty as her prisoners of conscience, whom she wrote in favour of to the various institutions and also to the people in prison. That was the one style, that it would be something of an encouragement for the people to receive letters. And when they didn’t get them, or just some of them, they knew about that. Or, say, when someone arrived later: ‘Yeah, you were on the Western broadcast channels, Free Europe or Voice of America, you’re under the care of Amnesty.’ They all said they could really feel when (Amnesty) took over the case, that the behaviour changed. The situation was different from the Fifties, after all, and they wouldn’t dare... they weren’t unpunishable. (Amnesty) would demand punishment for those who broke our own laws by using excessive investigation and interrogation methods and so on.”