Although we hired several more editors, we didn’t have time even to read all the letters we received. When I left the offices on Friday, I would carry them home with me in my briefcase, but I knew I wouldn’t have time to look at most of them. Foreign correspondents came to see us, as well. Many of them stopped by the foreign desk. This is how I came to meet Neal Ascherson from the Observer. He was interested in everything that was going on and in return invited me to visit his own editorial offices in London.
Vaculík, Pavel Kohout, Jan Procházka, Alexandr Kliment, Jiří Hanzelka, myself, and many other writers were often invited to various meetings and discussion evenings. It was as if a miracle were taking place. The silent crowd of people was suddenly transformed into citizens eager to communicate their opinions and suggestions. Most of all they asked us what they should be doing, what we thought about the situation, and how everything would turn out.
But we knew nothing more than they did.
When troops of the Warsaw Pact started traveling around our country in July pretending they were merely extending their planned maneuvers, I wrote an article in which I challenged our government to make it clear that if we were attacked, we would defend ourselves. (As early as the beginning of May we published such a challenge, in which my colleague Jiří Lederer quoted from Le Monde: “General Yepishev, chief of the Main Political Directorate of the Soviet Army, announced that the army of the USSR was prepared to fulfill its duty if he received a request from a group of loyal Communists to come to the aid of socialism in Czechoslovakia.”)
Milan Jungmann called me into his office and said my article might incense our Soviet comrades even more. They were already incensed, I objected. But if they knew we were willing to take up arms, perhaps they were hesitating, if only in view of the international repercussions a war in Central Europe would have. To capitulate ahead of time had turned out to be a serious tactical mistake in 1938 when we surrendered to Hitler without a fight.
Finally I agreed that we would go to the Central Committee of the party and consult with them.
Most of the functionaries had already been replaced in the ideological department. I was received by Milan Hübl, who was also a member of our working group of historians. He said he’d read my article with interest. Afterward he rose, brought out a large map of Europe, and ran his finger along our borders. Here the border with the Soviet Union continues with the border with Poland, then the German Democratic Republic, where Soviet units remain until today. Then a small border with Bavaria and neutral Austria, and then Jan Kadár’s Hungary. “And you want to take up arms?” he asked. “As far as international repercussions go, have no illusions in that regard. The Americans will submit a note of protest; the French will submit a polite query that will make its way to a meeting of the UN Security Council, where every resolution will be vetoed by the Soviets. Furthermore”—he continued his deductions—“the Soviets are just waiting for something like this so they can substantiate our betrayal because to take up arms against the Soviet army would mean betrayal. The manifesto ‘Two Thousand Words’ was enough for them to allege that socialism was under threat in Czechoslovakia.”
It was difficult to decide who was right, but I pulled the article.
*
About a week later two students appeared at our offices asking to speak with someone in charge. They were brought to our department, where Saša Kliment and I happened to be. The students feverishly told us they had positive information about a provocation being prepared by Soviet agents who were calling for a demonstration on the Old Town Square in the name of some new organization (I don’t recall the name). They were going to call for our exit from the Warsaw Pact and for a proclamation of neutrality. They had invited correspondents and journalists from the Soviet Union as well as the West. The students asked us to do something because the outcome of such a demonstration was certainly clear.
The students left, and Saša and I argued about what to do. As if we could prevent any sort of demonstration. The police were the only ones who could do anything like that. Finally we went to see the new minister of the interior, Josef Pavel.
It was a strange time when two editors from a literary newspaper could set off for the Ministry of the Interior, introduce themselves at the porter’s lodge saying they had to speak immediately with the minister, and a few minutes later enter the minister’s enormous office.
The minister seemed out of place in the expanse of the room, even symbolically small. We relayed to him what the students had told us. The minister didn’t seem at all surprised (it later occurred to me that he’d certainly known about the planned provocation before we had) and said, “Gentlemen, if we started forbidding people to gather, we’d be behaving just like those who had forbidden us before them.” But he promised to take it under consideration and consult with his deputies. With that we were dismissed.
The police actually did prevent the demonstration, but those who had prepared the provocation could go off and organize another one at any time. There was no doubt about that.
Essay: Dreams and Reality, p. 503
My father and mother, before I was born.
Passport photo, age seven, for a passport I never used.
In the army, 1953.
During one of my reportage expeditions, here with
Mirek Červenka in the Soviet Union, 1956.
Family wedding photo, from the right: father,
mother-in-law, grandmother, Jan, Helena, myself,
mother, father-in-law, sister-in-law.
Helena and me with my brother Jan in London,
en route to the United States.
.
As a visiting professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Tuning in and listening to Svobodná Evropa
[Radio Free Europe] with Helena.
© Michal Klíma
Working as an orderly, early 1970s.
© Petr Kliment
A get-together in Broumar; Milan Uhde reads aloud. To his right, Honza
Trefulka; to his left, Milan Jungmann and myself, June 1984.
With Milan Kundera, 1973.
Michal and Arthur Miller at our place in Hodkovičky.
Meeting with Philip Roth during one of his visits.
With Pavel Kohout and Václav Havel at the beginning
of the 1970s in Hrádeček.
From left: Zdeněk Kotrlý, Miroslav Kusý, Milan Uhde, Šimečka Junior,
Václav Havel, Miroslav Zikmund, myself, Milan Šimečka, Eda Kriseová,
Petr Kabeš, Karel Pecka, Milan Jungmann, Jan Trefulka, Iva Kotrlá,
Lenka Procházková, Zdeněk Urbánek, Ludvík Vaculík,