Vladimír Rams

“And then came November 1989 and gradually the social and political situation was changing in the Czech Republic, in the former Czechoslovakia. But we were far from trying to renew the process, to let the same people, who judged and sentenced us, to rehabilitate us again. Because the same policemen stayed there and only a few were thrown out, just to look good, and they got even better posts later. The judge was there the whole time, the prosecutor worked in the same post until he died... Political life changed and was played with the same puppets. Those, who worked there before revolution, kept working there joyfully even after that. So our own trust in any improvement of political climate was very low... We welcomed what was official, all that happened in Prague, but we knew exactly that in Karlsbad everything remains the old way. Policemen, prosecutors, judges, they went hand in hand as they did before.“

“It was the 7th September, 1977 and I was only seventeen years old and before five in the morning on Monday the secret police came to arrest ten people here in Karlsbad. They were not the criminal police, nor the standard policemen. Those were the secret policemen, as in Karlsbad there was the largest secret police base straight after Prague. They came, only one for some, two for others, it resembles the Wild West chase. They were driving their volha cars on the lawns of Merklin and could not of course figure where people lived; it was a bit of a mess, a chaos. Anyhow I didn’t go to school that day, I went to Vary to ípéčko. Ípéčko is a famous street in Karldbad, the same as Bartolomějská in Prague, and the former criminal police was based there along with the secret police. It was the police centre in Karlsbad. They took us ten boys in individual offices and interrogated us. It was rather unpleasant for seventeen year old boys as they put us under psychical pressure, forced us to say what they needed us to say and wrote that down in the report. Finally after four hours of interrogation they presented the charged and told me to read them and comment. It was half a page of charges, which I read then. They kept repeating clichés like enemy of socialistic regime, enemy of state, which I was totally unprepared to comment. So I just said: ,The only thing I can say is that there are mistakes.‘ And they asked me back: ,What mistakes? You mean in the content?‘ – ‚No, there are grammar mistakes, you can see incorrect punctuation, many mistakes indeed.‘“