Tomáš Vrba

"As I said, the estimate could be twenty to thirty people. It was largely not only due to the friendship with Michael Konůpek, but also the fact that my wife could interpret for them. Whereas when, say, Dutch journalists came, it had to go through English. So they actually always had it better, especially when it was an interview with somebody. I facilitated the interviews for those journalists, for example with Jiří Dienstbier or other Chartists, so then they actually had an exclusive interview." "The interesting thing was that those Norwegian journalists, compared to other journalists, I often spoke to French journalists for example, those Norwegians were always absolutely perfectly prepared. For one thing, they knew what they wanted, and also, what touched us, my wife and I, was that to be inconspicuous, the first thing they did was to buy this worn-out, ugly ski jacket in a second-hand shop to blend in with the crowd."

"As far as the Scandinavian volunteers are concerned, some of them were also here in person at the time. But mainly then in their own countries they were raising money to support, for example, the families of imprisoned Chartists or for some particular shipments. I know that one time it came up and it was announced conspiratorially at first... I think it was something like that: Maybe a gentleman who can't see well arrives. And it turned out to be, I am not sure it was a Norwedian, but somebody just arranged for somebody to come to our apartment with a huge video camera that was intended for the Original Videojournal or some similar activity. And we kept that for a couple of days. And then we were told to hand it over to Věnek Šilhán, or 'the šilhavý - squint', who 'sees badly'. And that was also the result of this fundraising collection."

“In the middle of it stand the statues of giants falling into hellish abyss, into Tartarus. And the passageway led from Tartarus, that’s probably where the water sculptures were originally, the fountains above the stairway, those kind of Baroque whimsies... And it was completely clogged up over the centuries and with various floods... It was about two metres high, it had an oval, egg-like cross-section, and it was flat at the bottom. It was about a hundred metres long, so we were there for several months. There were three of us, sometimes five when someone joined in. So simply: dig out – haul away. Dig out – haul away. Dig out – haul away. And back then the whole thing was, I think, that the whole foundations of the palace were bare so that the insulation could be installed, so we emptied it out around the foundations, we didn’t haul anywhere far. Then we got all the way to the middle, and suddenly I looked up and saw there was a light overhead, there was a glass dome, a circular vault there, so it had the shape of a beehive, with a window at the top, and at the bottom – we crawled through first – there were just some two metres of earth left to be dug out and carried back those hundred metres or so. But it was almost finished, so we took a break, lit a cigarette, because almost all of us smoked except Honza Víta, I think. And suddenly one of us said: ‘And do you remember, back then twenty years ago, when we dug that tunnel?’ said the film director. ‘Well of course,’ said the history professor, ‘you can’t forget an experience like that.’ We started speaking lines of the roles as-if of some film or play from twenty years later. And it happened exactly like that. Twenty years later I was editor-in-chief of Lettre internationale, Honza Vít was the program director of TV Nova, Petr Kučera was a history professor... It was fulfilled. And now tell that to the screenwriters. Them at the Memory of Nations will be shaking their heads as well... In other words, we foretold the future in a moment of some kind of clairvoyance.”

“I started out with Zdeněk Pinc, who lived at Cimburkova 8, and this was perhaps Cimburkova 21, on the other side, at the bottom end, and I told Zdeněk I was there. And luckily I guess I told him about the Vohryzeks because one time – I was already asleep I think, at night, around one a.m. – and there was some scratching on the door, or tapping. He must have woken... because the flat was divided up, there was a family living there, no Gypsies, just some family with children in the flat there, and the one room was... it’s hard to imagine nowadays. So he rang there at one in the night, they went to open the door, saw he was an invalid and so didn’t take any more interest in the matter; he tapped on my door and told me, nerves wracked: ‘Look here, take the keys to my flat...’ I had been to visit him many times, so I knew where he lived – and he described exactly where everything was in the flat and said there was a State Security car waiting on the corner in front of his house, waiting for him. He had noticed the car, gone round the block and gone straight to me... ‘Please, go there, get in there somehow, but don’t switch the lights on.’ And luckily he remembered exactly where everything was: ‘Take this, this stack, these things... and bring them to me here.’ And so I really did go there, and I remember how my heart hammered away, and I pretended I was a drunk, so I got inside the house and the cops didn’t have to think there was something suspicious with no lights going on because half of the flats faced into the back yard... So I really did gather up some of the stacks there, then I staggered out again, walked back, and Zdeněk breathed a sight of relief, I did as well, and then he went home and said... He only told me this now, a week ago – that the next day they came to search his flat, and they walked around there, saying: ‘It must be here somewhere, it must be here somewhere...’ And that those were some cyclostyle matrices that were supposed to be used to print something from, and it was awfully important or what and would have been a terrible fix, that it was connected to Jirka Müller in Brno or what, and that they had managed to burn it.”