Ivo Valent

“It was interesting, I hadn’t counted on something like that until then. But it became clear that in practice, there was the Socialist Work Brigade, which was in control of certain lucrative lines, such as Prague–Bratislava. If I joined the Party and became a member of the Socialist Work Brigade, which would endorse me as a new employee, my advancement would be much faster. I had never thought of anything like that before. I did not such thing, of course. In the end what I did was I switched over to the [Prague] Public Transit Company at the turn of 1988 and 1989.”

“Mum told us that when she got inside Parliament, the MPs held a chaotic session there for some time. When the soldiers arrived, the situation got much more dramatic. She said she remembered seeing Marie Kabrhelová crying in the toilets because she couldn’t understand how our brothers could do something like that to us. She was a Communist who was convinced of the friendly relations between the Soviet people and us, so she couldn’t understand what was happening. That was the source of her disillusionment. I remember that Mum told me that she also saw an MP tell one of the soldiers there that he could be her son. They had orders to quell the counter-revolution. When they saw what was going on here, I guess it caused them some embarrassment. But they had to fulfil their orders, of course. I myself served in the army for two years, and seeing that I spent my second year right near the borders, in Aš, I can’t imagine stopping someone who wanted to cross the borders. That would be terrible trouble, and I’d get myself in a real stew.”