Daniel Rusniok

"They picked us up, took us away for questioning. I remember how they took me, I still had this strange jacket, like between a coat and a jacket, and it was still covered in paint. And they immediately took it as evidence. They took us upstairs somewhere and I just stared. How old I was and what was going on. I was trying to understand things and I was like, 'Oh, yeah. We shouldn't have done that.' And, actually, there were Soviet soldiers sitting on the bench in front of the offices, maybe three or four of them sitting there in these boots, caps on their heads, radios on the ground in front of them, big boxes, and they started... the communications was going on. I thought to myself that they must have some kind of action there, that they were practicing something. And the policeman, of course in plain clothes, so he wasn't an ordinary policeman, says to me, 'They're here because of you, so you know,' and I say, 'Why?' And he says, 'Because of you two, there's a hundred policemen in action, and we're dealing with what's started to happen here, that there's an anti-regime protest.Where they took Aleš, I don't know, but then they took each of us to the building and we had to point, always stand in front of the symbol and show with our hands that it was us. Because there they were dealing with the evidence that we had committed this crime."

"Of course, the biggest uproar started when we moved in front of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia building, where things got a bit heated. We... the heroes, who were in euphoria, started to push into the front door. Then ran out, what they were called, they weren't normal policemen, some kind of riot unit... I don't know what it was called, but they had helmets with long shields and batons. And there it went off in such a way that we were surprised but stayed there. I saw a couple of people get hit on the back there, and I think Růžička got hit too. I think it's in front of my eyes, him running and that long baton bending over his back. So we retreated to the Prior, but we stayed there. We started shouting there, shouting, but it was all about the smog. And [Antonín] Váňa [the district secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in Teplice] came out - this is well known - and started shouting, 'What do you want? What is it? What's going on?' Some people started shouting, 'What are you doing to us? How come...' And I remember I stood on this flowerpot and I said something there, like towards him, like towards him specifically. And I said to him, 'I mean, you can see it all over the place with the smog.' I used to go to Dubí, the forests destroyed, everything in those hills dry, it was died out. And he was like, 'Where are you from? And where do you work and where do you live?' And I said, 'Yeah, I'll tell you, and you can arrest me tomorrow.' That was my answer. So we were yelling at each other like that, and then other people were yelling. Well, then they realized that the best thing to do was to let the crowd yell, they'd get tired and then they'd go somewhere."