Marcela Wallenfelsová

“Basically, everyone had to participate in May Day parades. So you’d go to the meeting point, where you’d make the rounds of the important people like background profilers and directors, so they’d notice you’d really been there. Then every citizen bought the stuff they sold at the meeting places. Scarce bananas, scarce sausages, some better-quality rolls... When you made the rounds like that, you could slowly look to slip off home again. Sometimes you succeeded, sometimes you failed. Some of your colleagues who were better placed then began to keep watch on you. One time some - I think it was a teacher of Marxism-Leninism - caught me by the hand and said: ‘Come on, let’s go together.’ So I couldn’t escape, and I really did pass by the grandstand. We talked about that with my husband yesterday... The people around mostly raised their hands and shouted: ‘Long live Comrade Novotný!’ And I felt terribly awkward. I wasn’t able to raise my hand and shout. So I kind whispered: ‘Long live Comrade...’, but it was awfully unpleasant. Only very few people actually reached the grandstand because most people legged it into the side streets, or suddenly set off against the flow. So I think that the people on the grandstand didn’t have to stay there for long because the parade passed by very quickly.”

“I was phoning with a colleague who was staying in the United States in 1969 and who I was substituting for at the faculty. He asked me on the phone, and of course I could hear the bugging devices, several of them clicking away in the phone... He asked whether he should emigrate and whether people were being murdered on the streets here. So I told him: ‘I won’t answer the first question, and with regards to the second one, I can tell you there aren’t any murders, that at least I haven’t seen any murder on the streets - that they’d actually shoot someone on the spot.’ So then he returned from the United States, which was a mistake, and he said: ‘But you persuaded me to come back.’ So I told him: ‘You dunce! How was I supposed to tell you to stay there!’ But several people did do that, say Professor Záruba told his assistant, when he asked whether he should return from the United States, he said straight up: ‘Jirka, you’d be crazy to come back. Stay there.’ But I didn’t have the courage to do that due to having children.”