"When we came to our apartment, which had windows facing the park, of course, the windows were broken out, emptied. That's how I saw the panorama, which I remember quite well. The Jesuit church was on fire, and there were other hits on the left. You could see that. Dead horses were lying in the street. There were carters with horses. There was a lot of black paper flying in the air. Just as some buildings were hit somewhere and they were on fire. The official records and whatnot. So the black paper and the smoke. That, to me, was kind of a sign of the bombing."
"I've been there, right. The funeral was in the ceremonial hall in Židenice because the central one was being repaired at the time. Again, an anecdote. Only the closest people could fit in the ceremonial hall. Someone spoke for the literary community, but neither Uhde nor Trefulka got in. We stood with the crowd. I stood at the top of the staircase. Suddenly I see the crowd on that staircase spreading out and making a kind of aisle of butts. They're turning their butts to whoever's coming. And I looked down, and my good old friend Jaroslav Šabata was climbing up that staircase. He and his wife were climbing up. The crowd was turning their backs on them. Nobody wanted anything to do with them because it was clear that the crowd... We knew it was infested with State security. Šabata came up, so we shook hands. I was happy to be associated with him at that time, but these people didn't want to. These were the same people who, a week later, started to go to Freedom Square and shout and demand regime change. Time has torn the curtain, or to put it another way - God turned the page in the history book, and people started to behave differently, but I don't have any explanation for that."
"I rather remember the panic the next day when the air raid alert was sounded again, but the sirens were no longer blaring because the air raid destroyed the system, but the steam locomotives at the station were blaring in unison. The whistles of the steam locomotives mimicked the rising and falling howl of the sirens, and it could be heard quite far away. Those who had legs, those who had anything, ran out of town. I happened to be with my second uncle at that time on what is now Štefánik Street. It was New Street, then. I saw those wood gas trucks, if there were any, rushing out of town and people jumping in their way with their arms outstretched. It was a terrible panic immediately after the raid the next day."
"Well, yeah, the flags were hung. When the war ended, flags were hung in celebration. But that's kind of the juicy detail I also mentioned in the book. There were Czechoslovak flags. It turned out that a lot of people were hiding them. They were hung up. But Soviet flags were flying next to them. But where to get red flags? Well, they used to take those German red flags with a white field with a black swastika in it. They tore off the white field, and then it was hoisted as a Soviet flag next to the Czechoslovak flag. That was used for quite a long time afterward. You could see that on the flags where the wheels were after the swastika."
"So, you know, after all these years, I think I've learned a lot about myself and about people. An absolutely unforgettable experience that I was enriched by compared to other intellectuals. The experience was that I met people who didn't give a damn about politics, who were virtually oblivious. That was most of the people I worked with there. I can illustrate that with an anecdote. I'd been there for a couple of years. I don't even remember in what capacity exactly. I always even changed in and out of the dungarees. And one of these guys came in. We didn't know who he was, and he threw some emigre writings on the table in that dressing room. As there was some break while we were changing, the guys were going through it. There happened to be Škvorecký's list of banned authors in one of those, too. And they found me on the list. So they huddled together, looking through it. They said, "Is that you?" "It's me." Two hours later, nobody knew anything. Two hours later, nobody cared anymore. These people had their worlds. These people cared about their worlds, their families, their cars. And nobody asked me for any explanation, nothing. The communists, they were the masters, and they had nothing to do with them. During the time I was there, about two guys came through that locker room who had communist legitimacy. They were made fun of mercilessly by the others. Why is that? Because if somebody was a communist, paid their dues, and was so stupid that he couldn't find a better spot and had to get up early in the morning, and dress up in dungarees and work with his hands, he was an asshole. Then why did he pay the dues? That was the reason the guys made fun of them."
Pavel Švanda was born on 6 June 1936 in Znojmo to parents Anna and Josef Švanda. After the seizure of the borderlands in September 1938, he moved with his family to Brno, where he survived the bombing in November 1944. In the 1950s, he joined an unspecified illegal resistance group, distributing weapons and leaflets. After graduating from high school in 1954, he began to study art history at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University. But because of his work and family life, he did not finish his studies. In the 1960s, alongside Václav Havel, Jiří Kuběna, and others, he was a member of the literary group the Thirty-Sixers. Between 1960 and 1968, he worked as the manager of the Družba cinema in Brno. He contributed his film reviews to the daily Rovnost (Equality) and later to the journal Host do Domu (A Guest in the House). From 1971 he worked at the national company Labora. In the 1970s, he published in the samizdat circle Texty přátel (Texts of Friends) and the apartment theatre Šlépěje v okně (Footsteps in the Window). After the Velvet Revolution, he wrote for the magazine Naše Rodina (Our Family), Akord (Chord), and Lidová demokracie (People’s Democracy). Between 1992 and 2015, he worked at the Theatre Faculty of JAMU, where he received the title of professor in 2000. Pavel Švanda lived in Brno in 2023.
Apartment reading Šlépej (Footstep) 1973: from left Josef Šafařík, Pavel Švanda, Jiří Kuběna, Jaroslav Erik Frič, Josef Šafařík's wife (left), Blanka Švandová (beside)
Apartment reading Šlépej (Footstep) 1973: from left Josef Šafařík, Pavel Švanda, Jiří Kuběna, Jaroslav Erik Frič, Josef Šafařík's wife (left), Blanka Švandová (beside)
