Milan Richter

"Well, we had a commander, it was called a chief. And he was the chairman of some party organization. And the relations were kind of cool and there were no problems. And he took me aside like that one time and he said, 'You, Milan, man, you're so good, you're so smart, you don't have any trouble. So we talked about you at a party meeting, that we would nominate you as a party candidate.' I said -because I was already a bit distant about it: 'Yeah? No way, for God's sake. I don't know, come on...' 'Well, no, it's not possible, but of course, it's also the fact that we had to ask at home, so we wrote to the local Communist Party organisation there. Well, I was surprised at the reply that came back! We can't accept you as a party candidate!' I said, 'Well, that's clear to me!' So it was funny, that's how my dad saved me. I can't imagine if they had pressured me, that would have been stupid."

"When Palach died, that's when we were... I was at Wenceslas Square and such an event... Like this, spontaneously, people gathered there. Then they went. Well, there was a guy and he had this Czechoslovak flag, but a big one. And now he was running around with it. So somehow the four of us got together and we each grabbed one end of the flag. And now we spread it out, now we shouted, 'Jan Hus! Jan Palach!' and slogans like that. And we walked down from the top of the museum where it happened, and we went down and we were going to walk through Wenceslas Square. But we noticed that people had joined us behind us. So you could say that I [made] a kind of demonstration with these guys. Because there were actually more of them following us, such a crowd. So we turned onto Příkopy and we kept shouting, and now it was buzzing because there were more people and more and more. We went through Republic Square, through Revoluční Square, we sovereignly entered the Letná Tunnel. There the cops stopped the traffic so that there wouldn't be trouble. So they didn't do anything to us. We got out, we walked through Letna and we said we were going to the Castle. And that was really a parade! I don't know, a parade - maybe a hundred metres, a hundred and fifty metres, like on May Day, on Letná. And good, we came to the Powder Bridge and we walked there from the Powder Bridge, along Letná, there is the crossroads. And we went up there and there were some trucks and some police vans. But like, 'Calm down, disperse! This is the end, no more! Blah blah blah.' So that's how it stayed, those people, and now there were different shouts of something, blah blah, and that was the end of it."

"And then he was appointed Chief Military Prosecutor of Czechoslovakia and Deputy Prosecutor General. So he was basically the top dog. He got the rank of colonel—those were the three stars back then. And he was probably at the peak of his career. He was always trying to push for these kinds of things. At that time, there was a great opportunity with what was called the Prague Spring, you know, and so on. Already from 1967, things were calming down, becoming looser, even though the leading party, the ruling party, that didn’t change—everything still had to go through them. But it wasn’t as bad anymore, and that was clearly visible in art and culture, and so on. So that was good. He also started to try to get involved in some things then. They rehabilitated Rudolf Barák, who had been the Minister of the Interior. He had also been arrested and convicted. Then came Štrougal as Minister of the Interior. And they managed to get Barák released and maybe even rehabilitated. But as he said, otherwise it was all so confusing that it was hard to make sense of anything. He said the only real chance, generally speaking, would be to declare: ‘Everyone who was convicted from the day of a certain decree or ruling is innocent and was never truly tried.’ That was the proposal, because individual cases couldn’t even be investigated—there weren’t... The State Security didn’t mess around. They had everything under control, and the court just rubber-stamped it. I mean, just look—only two weeks ago I saw that they rehabilitated Father Toufar. Just two weeks ago! And the State Security beat him to death sometime around 1950."