Vladimír Václavek

"It happened that I was heating one winter in a company in Brno. A boiler operator, that was such a good job. Nobody was pushing you too hard there, you were just kind of hiding there. And it happened to me that we were at a party somewhere, which went on for a long time, and I didn't come to work for about three days. Well, now, because they didn't have anybody there to heat, the director of the plant was heating instead of me. And when I got there, he said, 'Next time it happens to you, you don't have to come at all.' So yeah, so I kept heating and then the next time it happened to me, I didn't come just because he had said so, so I didn't come. And then, I don't know, a month later, one morning, six o'clock in the morning, there's a knock on the door and there's the cops at the door. So they put me in the car and we picked up some more people on the way and took me to their office. Then again, some kind of older policeman took me to interrogation, and why I wasn't going to work, and what I was in danger of, he told me. I knew very well what I was in danger of. Well, I told him straight out, 'Look, the director told me that if I wouldn't come, I shouldn't come anymore.' So what happened was that he took the phone and a little while later the lady from the personnel office came and stamped my ID card and I left. The director confirmed that, he was an honest guy."

"They had to get approval, you couldn't start playing, you had to go to some approval performance where they tested him of the history of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and some bollocks like that. There was a singer from the local operetta in hunter´s costume sitting there as the chairman of the committee. But somehow I managed that afterwards."