Jan Obrman

"I don't remember his name, unfortunately, but he became famous for other deeds. For example, there was a beautiful painting of Lada hanging in front of my office - and I invited a friend of mine, who is an expert on Lada, and he told me that it was a completely unknown work and that it had to be saved somehow. And I know that at that time, through my Czech colleague who was then the administrator through the Federal Assembly, a certain Mrs. Hamšíková, who unfortunately is also dead - so I asked her to contact the National Gallery and invite them to do an inventory, because there was no inventory of the furniture or art in the building at that time... and I really begged for, it mattered a lot to me, for somebody to come in there and map out what was there, decide what had to go somewhere either to the National Gallery or somewhere under the castle. Unfortunately, I was not heard to do that, and when I took up the question with this man, the gunsmith, he basically - and I will be very careful of my words now - he basically told me that for a small pocket money I could take what I wanted and that it would be all right. So I confess that I really broke out in a sweat, and I think we tried to contact the Ministry of Finance at that time, and we really asked for help, for it to be taken away. It led to the same person coming in with trucks, taking everything of value out of the building and into a warehouse somewhere, and as I recall, two or three days later, he basically called me - or I don't know if I contacted him and asked him how it went - and he told me that the warehouse had been robbed overnight."

"Vladimír Kusín, it must have been at the end of November 1989, invited Jirka and me, and he was to a large extent our mentor too, we respected him very much, he was a very educated and clever man, we experienced November eighty-nine very intensely, because Jirka and I basically stayed overnight and spent days and nights there, and it was mainly to write analyses for the US State Department so that they were able to judge the circumstances correctly, but it was also, of course, a support activity for the broadcast, putting the facts together. But anyway, our superior Vladimir Kusin invited us in three or four days after we started, poured us whiskey and told us, 'So I'm a State Security agent, I want to apologize to you, but unfortunately that's the way it is, and actually I never wanted to do any harm, I only wanted to do good.' And it was such a... we sat there a little... I remember with Jirka Peh clueless, and I won't deny that it was a shock."

"So we put together, and Christina was the main organizer, a group of students, mostly Germans, but not exclusively Germans, for whom we bought trips to Prague. Normally bus tours, it was usually - I don't know how many you can fit - usually for sixty people or there were 40 tour participants. They were mostly pensioners and elderly people - and now we had these two students of ours there and they always had two suitcases. One suitcase was clothes and the other suitcase was completely stuffed with books. Then when my father started experimenting with the microfiche and microfilm, they started bringing not only the books but the microfilm. And you're right, of course, the packing was also a bit romantic, packing it in chocolate boxes, because nobody would be fooled by that anymore, but it was about saving space, and Ivo Vacík worked at CTK as a photographer and thus had the technical possibilities to enlarge the films, and we still had a great ambition to get as much into circulation as possible."