Michal Ženíšek

"During the interrogation, did they try to recruit you as a State Security informer? Did anything like that happen?" - "I don't know. I don't remember much. I don't know, like... It was said that I should... Like I had to promise them that if he [František Otto] wrote me again, I would give them the letters. And if there was some development in that matter I had to tell them, I had to let them know. And they told me that they would find me, that they would know if something happened. I didn't put it in context. But the main thing was that they showed me the passport, to let me see they had it, but they didn't give it back to me. And they told me that they were starting a criminal prosecution against me for illegally leaving the country."

"They took me to the police station, to the office. I don't remember much about it. We took a different path to get there. I think we went through that prison. Maybe they did it to scare me. I entered the prison. They frisked me there. I could keep my cigarettes. Then we went to their office. Then when we went to get the letters, we used different exit route. That's when I found out that it was connected with the house where this Štědrý fellow lived on the first floor or the ground floor maybe. So I told them. I know that. They told me they didn't know him or I don't know what. When you went in there, it was the first or second office on the right. That's where they just asked me if I knew where I was. I said I didn't know. The Formánek guy read from some paper he had in front of him, he told me that I was in the State Security Investigation Room and that I was accused of illegally leaving the Republic. I was terrified, it didn't cross my mind to just laugh at them. I was twenty or twenty-one. It was just a completely different time. I knew all the stories about the State Security men, from Flajzar and so. He got maybe nine years and served a substantial part of it, then he was released."

"Beacuse that he lived in exile, that is, outside the Republic, and was only allowed to come here after the Revolution, he was the person who ran the Czech bookshop there because he was also the chairman of the then SRPS, the Association of Friends of the School. He just sort of coached it, he was the spokesman, because it was a Czech school. He was the only one who was always available. He had a shop on Lindengasse, which was the street adjacent to Mariahilfer Straße. That was Peter Pastrnak's role because he was the chairman of all these associations and he knew all these people who came to buy books from Canada, from Sixty-Eight Publishers, so they had it sent to him, he sold it. The cooperation with him was totally cool."

"The idea came about, as I said, at the moment when I saw František Derfler, a soloist of the National Drama Theatre or the State Theatre, I don't know what it was at the time, standing there in a queue. I told him about going to Vienna to make a film about exiled authors and so on. And he suggested that it wouldn't be bad if a similar bookstore was here, so that he wouldn't have to just stand in these lines that were really there, and there were plenty of them. Derfler being an old dissident and an old Charter 77 petitioner, it was quite logical that he would be interested."