Oldřich Vlček

"And he [my father] said, 'So if you really want to know why you were not admited to university, go to the district party committee here and they'll tell you.' But he said it as a joke. It's just that when you are eighteen, you go there. So I went there, I checked in, and they said, 'What do you want? What are you doing here?' And I said I was going to ask why I didn't get to university... I wanted to talk to the First Secretary. And a miracle happened, they actually sent me there. So I went in, I introduced myself, I said who I was, and he said, 'Yeah, Vlček, Vlček, Vlček...' Then he reached his hand, he had some files there. 'Yeah, that's clear. So you know what, comrade?' the man said to me, I don't even know his name anymore, 'You have to fit in the working class, you know... You have to fit in the working class, because you can't go on this way.' I said, 'How does one fit in the working class?' - 'Go to the factory, go to work.' - 'All right, I'll go. And where?' - 'Well, we have factories, so choose one, you can choose.'"

"The arrest meant that simply about eight people in leather coats broke into our flat one night, at half past two, sometime in the night. I, because I was bigger, woke up, my brother slept through it all, he was too small. They just raged around there, apparently looking for... I then explained it to myself that how my father... how he had been assigned to do communal politics, that apparently the traders whose trade was being taken away, that they had been bribing him. Because they turned our whole house upside down and they were looking even behind pictures. That he must have some vast amouts of money stashed at home, simply from these people who had bribed him so they wouldn´t have to join the communal companies or whatever. Of course they didn't find anything. Anyway, they took the father away, the mother was hysterical, of course. What was worse was that he disappeared, and we didn't know where he was for a long time, and only later did we found out that he was in Uherské Hradiště. And my mother was faced with the situation that she was completely destitute, she had two children and she needed to support them somehow."

"As I was saying, a lot of people, colleagues from whom I wouldn´t have expected it, suddenly started to turn their coats. Suddenly it was: 'But you said...' - 'Oh no, I was wrong!' It's like that with actors, sometimes actors act like children. And the emotional character stuff is very much pushed into the background because you have to create characters in general. You can be this one for a while, that one for a while, and sometimes, at least that's my experience, it leaves a mark on the actors that their personal opinion and their personal beliefs are sort of suppressed and they're able to adapt very quickly to what's needed, what's required. When you work in the theatre, the director asks you to do something, and either you agree on [the character of] the role, or he more or less forces you to do what he wants because he justifies it by seeing the bigger picture. You can discuss that you would see it this way or that way, but he'll say, 'You have to do it this way because I need it there in the whole.' Often that way of thinking or acting goes into your blood that I've rarely met actors who are really strong personalities in the sense that they stick firmly to their opinion. If it's because they're so used to being empathetic to what's being asked of them, to be in, to be flexible... An actor has to be flexible when the director wants them to do something quickly. Of course this doesn't apply in general, there are always exceptions, it's not an absolute rule, but a lot of actors just behave that way. So to go back to the purges, what happened was that a lot of people suddenly turned their coats. Of course, most of them were just the fundamental members of the party who had been running things for years, and they were joined by those who were turning their coats again. The head of the drama company eventually became Vašek Švorc, Jiřina Švorcová's brother, who began to rule it with a firm hand, which meant he told me clearly that as long as he was there, I would not play."

"Above all, the first question was: 'What is your opinion about the entry of Soviet troops? Is it international aid, or is it not international aid?' Of course, it made me laugh, and that made them quite angry, and then of course they started talking about my relationship with the Communist Party, and they gave me the enquiry result to sign. I refused to sign it, I told them, 'That's your opinion, but my opinion is different.' It said: 'Negative attitude to the past and present policy of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and rejection of international aid'. That was the crucial thing. So it was enough for dismissal. I said, 'So I'm going to be given the notice?' 'Well, we'll see,' they said, and then they were dealing with it, they were dealing with it. And then they started [to say] that they were going to wait with the notice - there were more of us like that, for example Jarka Tvrzníková, Martin Štěpánek - and [it was decided] that there would be established a group of the Socialist Youth Union (SSM). The ČSM, the Czechoslovak Union of Youth, that was before, and then in the 70s it turned into the SSM - the Socialist Youth Union. And that a group would be established, there were more of us. And that we would be obliged to go and read poems when there were anniversaries, and that we would be given points, for taking part on the International Women´s Day there and there, when they would call us as a cultural performance. That there would be some voluntary work, there would be some singing and also poetry reading. So the poetry reading had to be by Hora, by S. K. Neumann, it had to be literature that was recommended, that was approved and that was meant for those meetings. So that's what we were going to do. Well, we were actors, anyway! So I became a member of the Socialist Youth Union, even though I was over thirty, the entry was up to thirty-five. They had raised the age limit so they could still admit us."

"In the year 1953, Stalin died, and then Gottwald. I used to go to the factory canteen and I was completely shocked when people were crying at lunch. And I didn't know why they were crying. 'Well, Stalin died,' they said to me. It touched broader classes so personally that those people were crying! Personally, I didn't understand it, I had a certain aversion to it, or not aversion, but I was surprised by it. If someone close to their family had died, I could understand them crying, I've seen plenty of graves when I used to accompany funerals with the cross, the mourners would stand there and were crying uncontrollably, but this I really couldn't understand."

"My colleague Ivan Řezáč and I were also sent to some ironworks in the north of Prague and they wouldn't let us into the factory at all. We were only received by the director, we entered his director's room, he was facing us and behind him there were two busts, Lenin and Stalin. Stalin - at that time [1989] he was really there! Well, and he gave us a dressing-down immediately. He said, 'How do you imagine that you would like to wreck this place? Who paid for your studies? You graduated on workers' money! Is that right?' And that he wouldn't let us into the factory under any circumstances. And when we came out after that, as it [factory] was fenced off, there were groups of people behind the fence, and they were shouting at us, 'Is that you?' And so we were discussing like that over the fence, it had been already known, it was already spreading."