Petr Kahovec

“I couldn’t stay in the boiler room the second year because they made an inspection there. I wrote certain letters, which I sent to my friends outside. It was a number of letters. And they monitored them – we didn’t know that. I wrote something along the lines that Communism is worse than Fascism. I don’t know how I came by that, but it just occurred to me somehow. They made a check on my friend and wanted the letter from him. He started legging it, tearing it up and throwing the pieces about. It was worth their time to glue the letter back together, and then the military counterintelligence got the jump on me. That was something, I was quite surprised to see what types they were because I’d never met them before, of course. They shook their heads as to what I was thinking. But I didn’t talk with them much. They told me I’d have trouble. As soon as they started hiring for the uranium mines with the option of letting me off my last four months of military service, I signed it. I knew they’d send me off to Sabinov otherwise, so I signed up for the uranium drive.”

“ I signed Charter 77 because the deeper I saw into it, I became convinced and agreed with it and believed in it. So it was a purely pragmatic decision. [Q: Which year did you sign it in?] It was in the late Eighties, before I was employed at the water works. I was repeatedly visited by the stetsec [State Security officer - trans.] assigned to my case, and we kind of struggling along with each other. The interrogations, which I underwent in Tachov and Pilsen, were unpleasant of course, but it can’t be compared to the Fifties. It was a kind of step into the unknown, we knew what could happen, and I already knew back then what went on in the Fifties. But freedom was above all else.”

“Of course I couldn’t know them all. The police force had a lot of departments. It wasn’t just State Security. If a rank-and-file policeman had problems, it had to be highly trustworthy information, and then it was looked into. But the people who worked for State Security, their documents were sometimes saved. They had certain things in their files, and we got to those – in the way that we were bearers of state secrets. So some were allowed to retain their service, others not. But it was based on information provided by people who had come into contact with them, whether in a good or bad way. [Q: Regarding the destruction of archives, did you notice that?] More or less; the information we received about that came too late. The archives were destroyed immediately after November. It was terribly fast because they knew they needed to destroy it quickly. Some things were saved because State Security worked reciprocally and had some copies of things. So some things were saved, but most of it is gone.”

“The uranium industry was favoured at the time, so it was pretty well paid. In Harm, where I was, there were hardly any political prisoners at the time. I met people there whom I befriended because they had the same approach to life. The free-thinking sort. We respected the same music and went to music events in the regions around Jablonec nad Nisou, Liberec, where there was always something going on. I worked topside, so I didn’t witness what kind of culture there was among the miners. Maybe just in the pubs, where they played various games. That’s how it was under Communism, and it’s the same today, when they have slot machines. It’s on the same basis, on people’s mentality.”