“I did not get as far as Národní Street. I was in Albertov, and I was in Vyšehrad, and then we started marching in a procession down to the Vyšehradská Street, and we walked past the ministry of justice and then it was already clear that it was bad, because there was already a double line of policemen armed with shields and batons standing against us by the building of the ministry of justice. They were standing in two lines, and I was walking in the front row and about three people away from me there was John Bok. I had a camera borrowed from somebody, and when I saw those policemen, or the members of the Public Security, I was worried about the camera. I was not afraid for myself. Then, when we approached them, they started beating us and I, as usual, experienced a blessing in disguise. They did not hit me, and although they did not hit me, I got behind this row of policemen. That was because when they started beating us, somehow the row of people spread and I actually got behind that double line of policemen. I saw John Bok, and there were about five policemen beating him, they tore off his jacket and they threw him to the ground and they were beating him with batons. I think that there were six of them, because five of them remained there and one of them started running towards me, because I was running to them and I was in shock, I was yelling: ‘Leave him alone, leave him alone.’ And he ran to me, and he sprayed a tear gas into my eyes from some twenty or thirty centimeters and then I became dazed. Since I started feeling dizzy, several people then helped me, and I began to feel sick, and so I went to a tram stop and I went home and thus I did not experience the worst things that happened on Národní Street, because at that time I was already at home.”
“I was looking for some people who shared the same views, or I desired them. I wanted to sign Charter 77 for a long time after I had learnt that it had not ceased and that it was still alive. But I did not know anybody, I absolutely did not know anybody from that environment. Only after my first prison term I somehow... Or it was in some tavern and there was Miroslav Hájek, he is no longer alive, his nickname was Míra Nemíra, and he knew many families of Charter 77 signatories, and especially Václav Benda and his family. Somebody told him that I had been imprisoned for my poems. We started talking and he, I think, brought up the topic of Charter 77. I told him: ‘I would like to sign it so much, but I don’t know where.’ At that time he introduced me to Václav Benda, and I signed Charter 77 in his home. We were thinking about it, because my trial was being reopened at that time, and I did not want to wait and I simply signed it. In 1985 I was sentenced for the second time. Then I got to know other prominent people. At that time, they were figures of immense authority for me: Ing. Petr Uhl, Anna Šabatová, Petruška Šustrová, Dana Němcová, Václav Malý and later Václav Havel, of course, and many others. For me it was as if to step into some magical world.”
“This poem was lost, they confiscated it from me at that time and I have never seen it again. The name of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev was not mentioned there, but it was quite obvious. It was basically a kind of reflection on the reactions of those schoolmates and many people around me. It was nothing eloquent: ‘A dictator died, crowds rejoiced, how big will be his photo in tomorrow’s papers?’ Basically, you could say the poems were innocent things like this. But at that time, it was enough for being sent to prison.”
"They questioned me. I had no instructions and no idea of how to act. The sort of briefings on tracing paper that I saw later, those had been circulating within the Charter community, but I hadn't come across them before. I was pretty much lost, but I had enough sense to speak about myself and who I meant by the dictator, but as soon as they started asking me about friends and contacts in my phone books that they had confiscated, I refused to speak. That's when they tried to blackmail me, saying that if I told on them they'd let me go home, but if I didn't I'd face detention. These are the sort of things that, I would argue, are not about courage: you just realise that if you did it, you would simply lose yourself."
"I left home and settled in Prague. I approached Radim Vašinka and rehearsed in the [Orfeus] theatre, but I had a very unpleasant feeling that something was happening around me. That's when Tereza [Boučková] decided to quit; I don't know exactly how she described her problems but she felt her presence could endanger the existence of Orfeus. She left, and I actually said something along the same lines and left too. Then I got detained a few months later, maybe two or three. They came to get me at work - the Pension Authority - with a search warrant. They were neatly prepared, surprisingly - as we know, the way they used to do home searches sometimes was when someone left home and they just invited themselves in - but were prepared this time. They searched my workplace and my apartment, and then the landlord kicked me out saying that he wanted no problems with the State Security or the police."
"We made it to Wolker's Prostějov (poetry festival) with those poems. This is where I met Milan Princ from Písek with someone, and they invited me to a poetry evening in Písek they were organising. I was trying to... I had written poems called Let Society Live and wanted to consult with them beforehand but they said, 'No, no, it'll be fine.' They didn't see it coming... When I started, one of them kicked me under the table to stop me, but silencing me wasn't easy once I got going." - "Was that in front of an audience?" - "It was in front of an audience in a room in the municipal library of Písek."
Lenka Marečková was born in Počátky in the Pelhřimov area on 3 June 1963 to Milada Marečková and Jaromír Mareček. She completed the Pelhřimov grammar school in 1981. Then she started a two-year extension course in study tourism in Tábor. On 21 December 1982, she took part in an author‘s evening at the library in Písek where she recited her cycle of poems Let Society Live. Due to her poem Death of a Dictator, which referred to the recent death of Leonid Brezhnev, the State Security Service (StB) took interest in her. She was arrested a few months later, charged with sedition and ended up spending two months in detention. After release from detention, she signed the Charter 77 declaration in Václav Benda‘s apartment. She took an active part as a dissident in 1984 and became a member of the editorial committee of the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS) in the spring of 1985. In March 1985, she was sentenced to seven months in prison. Having spent two months in detention, she served five months in České Budějovice and then in Liberec. After release, she became an environmentalist, disseminating samizdat and documents. She took part in most of the anti-regime protests and was arrested, interrogated and detained many times. She graduated from the Faculty of Law of Charles University in 1996. She took part in the reform of the Czech prison system in the 1990s. She has worked in human rights protection and civic activities for many years. Lenka Marečková lived in the České Budějovice region in 2025.
