Ing. Jan Vondrouš

"We have prepared a concept for the transfer of assets. The district agreed to it, we paid nothing as part of the disposal, but we had to dispose of it dry. We had to get approval from Tomáš Ježek [Minister for Privatisation]. At the time, the chairman of the district privatization commission, Mr Srnec, and I drove to Prague in a Škoda 105, which was my company car. On Senovážné Square, where I think there is a shop or another bank today, there was the relevant ministry, where Tomáš Ježek was based. We arrived there, and the minister had no time, he was always busy. We were sitting there waiting. We sat downstairs and waited. It was about half past nine in the evening, and we were still sitting. And suddenly, around ten o'clock, the minister was leaving work to go home. So we caught him. He was also an Odist [ODA member], fortunately. So we caught him, and we said, 'Mr. Minister, take us, take us. [Tomáš Ježek:] 'And where are you from, boys?' 'From Krumlov. I'm the chairman of the privatization commission, and I'm the mayor.' 'Yes, you are ours, let's negotiate.' No favouritism. He was the chairman of the privatization commission and the Ministry for Privatization, so he had to hear why the district privatizer and the mayor came there. So, around 11:30 at night, we presented him with the concept. At the beginning, he said, 'Oh, no, boys, this won't work. You want to build communal socialism there. And we said, 'No, no. We do want to get it into private ownership, of course, but we want to get it there on our terms because we are representatives of the city, and we don't want to get it there on terms that are going to be determined by some office worker somewhere.' He was an office worker, but he understood this. We later developed clear rules that we presented to him. He signed that he agreed to it. And the property was transferred completely to Krumlov."

"First of all, those who brought me down to the town hall said, 'You are such a critic, you know how to do everything, so now come show off.' When someone tells you something like that, you either have to go for it, or you have to be quiet for the rest of your life. So that was one of the main reasons I went for it. But I have to tell you, I really didn't know what I was getting into. I suffered from naivety in the beginning. Gradually, I realised it wasn't easy. That I was going into something that was really my first time. It wasn't like before when one secretary of the national committee or chairman of the national committee would take over from another chairman of the national committee, take over the binders there, and take the same route basically. Alternatively, one mayor would hand over the files to the other mayor, and they would ride the same route. And they're set. Whereas here, really, one era has ended, and another, a completely different era, has begun. Even just all the laws that were changing. Property that suddenly wasn't everybody's and nobody's anything. It was a completely new situation. New decision-making processes. No Ferman from the Communist Party of the Czechoslovakia and eventually from the district. Independence in certain areas. New laws. The law on municipalities. So a completely new era, which was not entirely simple."

"I guess I was shaped by the fact that I didn't like Bolshevik. For thirty-eight years, or however long, I lived in an unfree era. Although nothing too bad happened to me, it was an unfree period. It was an unfree era, we couldn't go anywhere, we could only say some things. I remember about two years before the revolution, I told some people I thought were normal, 'It doesn't make sense, look, it needs some change', and they told me, 'You wouldn't want capitalism here, would you?' I told them, 'I'd like that, I'd like that,' and they were totally freaked out."