Marek Čmelík

"Aware, aware, because those cases were around us. I was friends with the Brno people who were really grossly persecuted. For example, they came to visit us in Kyjov. The State Security officers picked them up at the station in Kyjov, took them to the Ždánský Forest, and beat them up there. One of them had a cross cut out of his head, cut out with a machine. In Brno, the State Security officers wanted to throw a friend of theirs into Macocha, they held him over Macocha at night and told him whether he would do something or not. So we knew it wasn't easy. And basically, we were always expecting that somebody from our neighbourhood might be arrested, and that's what happened. But just the desire to stand on the right side was strong. I think I was already married, and my wife and I agreed that she'd rather not sign, so that somebody in the family would stay clean, so to speak. And I would sign."

"Well, dissatisfaction with the communist regime, which behaved as it did. And I have to say that I didn't sign the Charter until '77. Sorry, not until 1987, or the tenth anniversary basically, and I wondered how many times, or I thought, why didn't you do it sooner? Actually, it was clear to me from the beginning, but it wasn't that simple, was it. It wasn't like today, you click on some electronic petition, you put your details on it and you sign it. In those days, the risk of that signature was greater for the person who facilitated the signature than for the person who signed it, because of course the regime was watching. And even those friends of mine that I gradually made, they were a bit apprehensive at the beginning to offer someone the possibility of signing the Charter. And they also didn't want to put you at risk because they knew what it entailed, so basically one friend offered it to me only sometime in that year 1987. So officially, my signature came out."