Jan Soldán

“I got hold of a Party’s internal magazine and there was a text about me which said that I was organizing and that I had organized festivals and that I had signed Charter 77 and that I did things like that. I knew a colleague at work who was a communist. There were tons of communist at those times. And one of them told me that there was a communist meeting where they discussed me, and that normally they were all sleeping there, but that this time nobody slept. At that time I just had my hair shaved completely, and I looked just like Hare Krishna. I only kept one long plait of hair. When I walked into a pub like this for the first time to buy cigarettes, the whole pub went quiet. A woman was in the process of serving beer from the tap, and she just stared with her mouth open as if an extraterrestrial being came in there and the beer was overflowing the glass. I had my hair shaved during the weekend and then on Monday I went to work with this haircut for the afternoon shift. As I was walking through the factory floor, the factory stopped working. The cranes stopped moving and they all stared at me with open mouths, what kind of creature that was. They were used to long-haired types, but this was already a too big shock for them. Since that time, all people in Uničov knew me.”

“I wrote a letter to the BBC broadcast and asked them to play a song from the Plastic People in their songs on request program. Cops got into my post box and they discovered the letter. The StB cop Bartoň beat me so hard at that time that I was bleeding. I was sixteen (fifteen – auth.’s note). He took off my clothes and he was beating me with his fists and with a baton. Then he told me to go away, and he kicked me out just for the last train at seven in the evening.”

“At that time I lost everything. My wife with children left me. I did not have anything. Maybe one or two pairs of pants, two T-shirts, a bare-bones flat, with a mattress on the floor. I did not have anything. I was in shit. I fell to the very bottom and I found out that I had the most of all. I started believing in God. I knew how strong I was and I knew who I was. I found myself and at that moment I understood that they no longer had any power over me. They threatened me with army service and things like that. StB policemen came and they asked me where I was. I told them that I no longer wanted to talk to them. ‘What do you mean by this ‘don’t want to talk?’’ I said: ‘I have nothing to talk to you about. You are you and I am I and we no longer have anything to talk about.’ Fine, they stopped and they left, they let me be. And then I received a draft order for five months of military service.”