“We are the generation that can compare”
Josef Cepek, frontier defender and policeman, born 1936.
Quoted in Miroslav Vaněk and Pavel Mücke, Velvet Revolutions: An Oral past of Czech Society
Us and freedom
We knew freedom after the Velvet Revolution erstwhile we could finally…Say what was on our minds…Speak at last our thoughts and hearts…Watch Václav Havel, our fresh democratically elected president, address the US Congress, saying we Czechs and Slovaks besides have something to give, “Our freedom, independency and our newborn democracy have been purchased at large cost and we shall not surrender them”…We reminded the heirs of those who wrote and backed the US constitution with their lives of the meanings of freedom—
Our fresh freedoms were…To perceive to the news in Czech with a consecutive face…To pray (although we are mostly atheists) to God without being ridiculed in class, called in front of our boss or jailed…To open a copy of Playboy appalled but able to read it…To halt the secret police from blackmailing us, telling our spouses of our affairs unless we spied for them…To not duck our heads and be anxious, conscious at all times of what we thought, said or did, were accused of or subjected to even erstwhile doing nothing until our Velvet Revolution—
Many people, 1 person’s growth
I was just a kid erstwhile the revolution happened—we say in Czech the word převratný for an epoch-making time…My tiny town developed with me as I grew up, the business towers rose in the centre together with my tallness as a child…I was only 12 and fortunate due to the fact that we had good university professors who had been forced to teach at primary school, they were inactive decent and erstwhile the revolution started they took students to Wenceslas Square, where the people protested for liberty…I grew up outside Prague and as a teen graduating mediate school two-three months after the revolution, I callback our post-war past changed: we had always been told only the Russians freed us, now, they said it was the Americans too, suddenly, the Americans were back in our history…
…In my advanced school we went on strike following the general 1 of November 20th and in my anti-communist household we were ecstatic, as my grandma hunting mushrooms exclaimed, “I’m reaping ‘shrooms like the devil is mowing down the commies!”…At the time I was 22 and it was like a key abruptly turning, things unlocked and we were let out and it was large but people did not know what to do or how to react…For a fewer years I was not yet 30 it was the chaotic West, the police sat back on their heels and would not halt anyone from doing anything, looking the another way as criminals ran free…
…I almost did not announcement the Revolution at first, as a young parent the first of my 2 sons was already born and as we started our farm kept our boys with my parents, built our business on my maternity leave, I hadn’t planned for either a household or farm but with the revolution abruptly had both…Earlier I had told my wife I did not want to bring up children under this regime, not believing it could change, then after the revolution I was liable for more than just myself, our parents and besides our town…I was already retired and abruptly no 1 wanted a cigaret thrown on the ground, weeds increasing everywhere, to be embarrassed by our public toilets but we couldn’t shake all our habits…My grandpa never thought he would live to see it and died a fewer years later but told us, “Everything was dark and grey at night erstwhile the shops closed and everything sunk into sleep, now let’s see if you can make it different”…I was on his knee but alive and free believed that my village, my town, city and country could turn bright like the remainder of the world—
Getting out and coming back
The planet was abruptly open to us; in the past we had small usage for passports…I remember to go abroad we needed our identity cards and approval from both the police and safety forces, travel was only for the elites but now we could go…When I first set ft in Vienna, it was like seeing a fantastical beast previously unimaginable…I got out and worked in a pub in Elgin, Scotland…I became a nanny in Oxford to the manager of Radiohead and had never even heard of this celebrated band…I was nearly arrested trying to photograph an exotic ATM machine…I got a work-study visa to Snowdonia National Park in Wales and met my husband there, raising 3 children among Celts, people I never imagined increasing up in Jižní Město, our socialist housing estate—
I started importing cheeses from the Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland and France…I voyaged like a European immigrant at the start of the 20th century to the United States and saw no flaws at first, it was so large and rich…I inactive dream about my first time abroad and cannot imagine my youth, my life, without them although so long ago and increasing harder to remember—
The problems of fresh freedom
It was not what I imagined after the revolution; officially the communists were gone but inactive held on to everything…Even Havel was shortly disappointed he said democracy in the full sense of the word is simply a horizon always distant and only 20 per cent of the country understood him in the Prague cafés, not the average folks…Look how they are voting now even in the US-we utilized to repeat the slogan of the revolution “freedom is participation in power,” but who participates now? We utilized to ask how people usage freedom, how do they usage it now?
Freedom now for many is just to make do for themselves; to cheat, lie and bargain like before in fresh ways…From the start people accused others of being informers and during the lustrace (lustration) after the revolution were presumed guilty, who knew the difference between crooked and just like 1 political organization from another now…The ones who want power always find a way…Before we tuned into jammed abroad radio stations; now no 1 listens…We could cross the borders but inactive needed papers, we weren’t in the EU, not in Schengen…Even now they inactive see us and frankly we can act like second class Europeans, liberty seems besides much for us…Freedom is simply a drug that let us down—
The first taste of fresh things after the revolution was intoxicating, but my grandpa who had seen everything, war, invasion, occupation, knew by Christmas 1989, he said wait, it would not go well…No 1 could imagine the economical problems, insecurity of work and everything else, the breakup of Czechoslovakia after we had been together so long, the separation without a referendum…What did we get? Fresh lies and smears of the press…Fierce competition dividing the rich and connected from the recently disenfranchised… It seems best to turn back to our cottages like after 1968 and the crushed Prague Spring, the past was better or at least easier…Who remembers why we even wanted freedom and do we, anymore?
In 1 moment
We are more inclined erstwhile we effort and remember, callback seeing neighbouring countries, our fellow Visegrad states, retreating and losing what they fought for within surviving memory…Try not to forget what we were forced to endure before the Velvet Revolution, what we were compelled to do against our wills…To learn Russian, I inactive cannot talk the language of this false “brother” and unwanted master…To march in parades chanting slogans we did not believe in…To stay after work for compulsory courses on Marxism-Leninism where we slept and any held open their newspapers for the teacher to see…All we had to say, sign, join, eat, wear and witness…How scarce were goods and how uncommon clear consciences…How blocked everything was, inaccessible…How we saw pictures of the Vatican knowing we’d never see Rome, love stone music never see the Rolling Stones…How we weren’t allowed into the forests at night around a fire, at the frontier 10 kilometres from the border manned by soldiers with guns…Try not to forget this now erstwhile I think or talk freely…When I leap on planes to unknown lands…Remember everything we could not do, that was not permitted in our socialist paradise—
Would I go back? “Whoever lives in fear is not a free human being”: another saying of our Velvet Revolution…Our revolution with only 1 night of bloodshed due to the goodness of people erstwhile no longer angry or petrified…Remember and revive the possibilities of freedom: …To proceed what we were in our First Republic…To live again where we are, in the heart of Europe…To stake opportunities to do things new…To take chances to develop, experience and grow…To meet with frustrations, then to face and overcome obstacles…To effort another ways of life…And notwithstanding our unofficial national creed of “it will get worse,” – to believe that things can be better for the young and young at heart…From 1 minute in the Velvet Revolution, 34 and speeding on years ago, erstwhile freedom was a rush, a wave, a sensation, an atmosphere that you could breathe in the streets and effort on like fresh shoes, to think we could make this happen…To feel abruptly capable…To know and keep the memory of that fleeting, unrepeatable joy.
Gabriel M. Paletz first came to Prague in what was then Czechoslovakia just after the Velvet Revolution in 1990. A postgraduate of Yale University and the University of confederate California, he returned to Prague to teach screenwriting to students from 5 continents at the Prague movie School.
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