Milan Uhde

"The situation was complicated by the fact that my mother filed the lawsuit in a paternity matter - immediately - so she never wore the Jewish yellow star. Because she had filed the lawsuit first and then the court granted it. So, she even had an official document about it. Although the prosecutor objected to it, but it never made it to the appellate court… the appellate court never sat. So, my mother had a non-final but positive opinion... or a positive decision of the court that she was not Jewish. So, she didn't wear a yellow star. And yet, one day... I remember I went with my mother to buy meat, and we were thrown out of the shop. A lady - I can still see her in front of me - she had this fancy brown hat and a tall feather in it. She was a very mondaine lady who - in Czech, though - addressed my mother and gave her a speech that I didn't understand at all. But the point of the speech was that after all, my mother knows when she can shop and what she is. And that she shouldn’t put everybody here, especially the butcher and her husband, the owner of the shop... don't put them in a difficult situation, acknowledge the situation and so on. And so my mother decided that we would go away. We went away, and of course I asked what had happened. And my mother said: 'I was wrong. I was in a hurry, I wanted to get ahead of the queue, you know, and that's not supposed to happen, I admit it, that's not supposed to happen.' I felt that answer was untrue."

"So, I tried to make sure that the privatisation process went well. I supported the fact that Klaus wanted the privatisation not to have the right of so-called judicial review - because he knew that if there was a judicial review, the privatisation would take ten years and would never be completed. Everybody will fight back. Resourceful lawyers will find such ways, such other ways. The legislation is imperfect, the courts will say, the case law is not clear here, we have to do this or that. They said: this is a revolutionary process. Privatisation. We need to privatise, because Western companies said: 'State Steelworks Ostrava, it is not a partner for us. Is it Franta or Tonda who owns it?' It has to be done, otherwise there’s no way! So, against the Social Democrats and all those who said: judicial review is necessary - all the lawyers of that kind said that without judicial review (it can't be done) - so I supported it everywhere and I begged all the MPs... We managed to pass it - the law that there is no appeal against the decision of the privatisation commission. This is immediately implemented. And Klaus said: 'Speed, speed! Tomáš Ježek failed...' I said: 'How did he fail? They had half an hour for one privatisation project!' 'Well, that's just too much,' Klaus said, 'I would have given them two minutes.' I said: 'And what would they have examined on the project?' He said: 'The quality of the paper on which the project is written' - I'm reproducing verbatim - 'the quality of the paper on which the project is written. Milan, it doesn't matter! The market will find... The State Privatization Commission will choose Franta, Franta turns out to be bad, goes bankrupt, Tonda takes over, bad, Jirka takes over, and it turns out Jirka is great. The market will find him.' I said: 'Well, what about the employees who will be without a salary, who will be in insecurity?' 'Well, that's impossible... they will be poorer,' Klaus said, 'someone has to be the poorest. There’s no other way.' You know, of course, the cynicism was already there, I wasn't deaf and blind. But I saw that the demand for rapid privatisation was reasonable."

"He opened the summit on Monday morning. 'Who read the editorial in the Financial Times?' Nobody. 'Well, that's unbelievable. That's a major editorial. You didn't... Well, I'm out. I'm not going to start it, there's no point. Anyone who comes to this summit and doesn't know the editorial in the Financial Times has no business being here. I'm going away, I've got other work to do.' And now Zielenec is in - the only one who was on first-name terms with him. In his Czech Polish he said: 'Come on, Vašek, start it.' - 'Pepík, I won't. Really, come on... I'll ask once again. Who subscribes to the Financial Times?' One striver, who wanted to gain favour, put his hand up. He didn't gain favour. He said to him: 'Well, that's even worse. He's subscribing to it and he's not... That's even worse than not subscribing to it. No, I'm not going to start it.' - 'Come on, Vašek, look, we're all here, so start it.' - 'Okay, one last try, Pepík. Who read the last Mladá fronta Dnes, Právo and Lidové noviny?' No one raised their hands because, first of all, no one read it - it was 8.30 in the morning on Monday, after Sunday. Nobody read it. And they knew that to lie and say: 'I read Lidovky' - this Klaus would test him, he would say: 'So what's the editorial there?' or 'What's the main study on the second page?' So, nobody. And he said: 'So you see, Pepík, you see? I can't start it. No one reads here. Why do you come here? Why are you here?' Now we were all guilty - and now he started. 'Okay, I'll start it.' Klaus says to you: 'Kalvoda betrayed us, the People's Party is betraying us. There's a betrayal, Havel's a betrayer, here’s a betrayal, there’s betrayal...' We were all happy that he had already started to scold someone else. So, we didn't say... I would have said: 'Mr. Chairman, and aren’t you exaggerating, after all the ideas of that Tomáš Ježek' - who was in the ODA at the time - 'those are reasonable.' He said: 'We're doing banking socialism.' You have to think about that... I couldn't do it. I thought so, but I was nodding: yes, they are terrible, all against us. That was an atmosphere of absolute opposition to any kind of cooperation."

"And now I'll switch to the Charter. I told Jiří Müller, who visited me the day after Saint Stephen [on 27th December – trans.], 'I have to think about it. Can you leave the text here?' Jiří said: 'Yes, but only until tomorrow. I will come tomorrow to hear your decision. I said: 'Yes, in any case I will be ready to tell you what I have decided.' I consulted with my wife. She knew me. She had that five-year experience with me and she said: 'I don't think you should sign. You're not going to stand it. You'll not handle the pressure. And it's gonna be on me, and I'm gonna have to get you back on your feet. And I can't do it anymore. Please don't do this. Don't do it, it is enough you are hanging on as a banned author.' I've already sent the new radio play to Erik Spiess in the way that I'm going to describe to you as well - 'Don't do it.' But I was... not so much because of the text, but because of the feeling that someone is standing on my neck so that I can't breathe, and that here I have the opportunity to shout: 'They're killing me here, they're destroying me as an author! Look at this, all of you who are going to find out about this!' That was the pathos of the Charter for me - I must confess to it - rather narrow. I didn't much like the idea of dialogue with the Communist Party. The Communist Party never had any dialogue with me as a non-party member."

“The lectures and discussion were very interesting and they were attended by people, about whom I knew that they were so strongly opposed to Bolsheviks. This Šabata (note: Jaroslav Šabata, a Communist Party official until 1989, a dissident in the normalization period, spokesman of Charter 77, political prisoner) was making it apparent by some sixth sense that he was not an informer and that he would not go somewhere and say: ‘I have this person in my seminar, and his opinions are like this, and therefore, comrades, you should keep an eye on him.’ Comrades from Lenin Street, secret policemen. In October or November 1956 I received a personal invitation from him, which many students had received before and they already knew what it was. They said: ‘He will offer you a membership in the Party.’ I thus went there and his first question was: ‘How do you view the political situation, comrade Uhde?’ I said: ‘Well, undoubtedly, what is happening is an atrocity. The intervention of the Red Army in Hungary… This is a breaking away from socialism. I hope that you are intending to leave the Party.’ In this way, the offer was dealt with… It was already absolutely clear. And I had not known it beforehand, I just simply and spontaneously asked him whether he intended to cancel his Party membership. And he replied that no way, because the movement was now turning to the right path and because the objective of this movement was to bring back liberty to the society... I replied to him: ‘But this will be no liberty. I read Sartre and he says that an objective is a summary of means which we had exerted for its attainment. This is the objective. If you sow grain, something will grow. And if you murder people and occupy other countries, etc., then you will not attain any socialism at all. You will turn into a strict dictatorship. This is where your movement is heading now.’ We thus agreed that we would not be able to agree upon this, but that we would watch the issue and keep seeing each other and exchange our opinions.”

“It was the limit of the 1960s. The people there were lying, they were claiming that they stood for socialism. But even those who were not for socialism were saying it. Everybody pretended that it was a reform, but only some people wanted to reform. And there were restrictions, that it true. The Union of Writers could not even offer a candidacy to Václav Černý. He would not have accepted it anyway, obviously, because he was a writer. Some people were simply out of question. Josef Kostohryz, Václav Renč... Catholic writers, but they were undoubtedly writers who belonged there. It was unthinkable and nobody even suggested them, people were saying that it was not possible. That was the limit of the 1960s. And I simply think of it in a way that although I did publish my anti-Communist play (note: theatre play King Vávra), at the same time I was feeding on grass from graves… I later used this expression publicly in a samizdat, I wrote that we were grazing on grass from graves, that we had been buried there alive and that we were eating this grass from graves just like the goats of the priest from Havlíček’s well-known poem... Priest’s cows will graze on you every summer... Do not allow them to bury you in a cemetery, my boy. A great poem by Havlíček (note: journalist and poet Karel Havlíček Borovský, the poem ‘Grave’). We were grazing on grass from graves, although we were pretending to be warriors for freedom.”

“This loyalty pertained to politics as well, and that was why I felt with the German soldiers at Stalingrad who were defending us, right, and I felt with the communists. It was one of my lifelong ideas or dreams that I would be a loyal citizen, an honest citizen and an honest person. My young friend Jiří Šimsa, when he reviewed my book Rozpomínky - he knew me well, although he was two generations younger - he wrote that he felt how difficult it had been for me to take courage to sign Charter 77, because I always desired be in agreement. Rebelling or opposing something was not natural to me. And my second lifelong experience, which is perhaps no less intense, it is perhaps even greater, is a feeling of fear. I remember that this fear, although nobody instigated it in me - on the other hand, my parents tried to create an ideal of a family idyll as hard as they could - everything is all right, the sun is shining and people are smiling, singing, and playing the piano, dad playing the violin, and we are talking about nice natural positive things - and in all this I could still feel the artificiality and pretence of it. A child can sense it, even if it does not understand it and cannot interpret it nor define why it is.”