Photos/Czech 05 — Edo and his father Eduard.jpg in the Consultancy folder.[Referring to Jan Palach's grave] No monuments — it's places for dead people. Cemetery. Cemetery. That's a great cemetery.
So the same information was in the Saturday newspapers, yes — 18th November. And we don't have a Vienna TV from Austria, so we didn't get more information, and more exact information.
Who? A student?
Students, yes. Students. I only know that the students knew it, but they didn't think — me — that it was a great deal.
And then we had one teacher who was very active against the communist system.
In your high school?
In secondary school, high school. He had good thinking and good experience — no bad experience with these communists. So he spoke about it with us.
What did he say?
He said that perhaps today there would be anything interesting in our great square — Náměstí Svobody. And the first thing — that in Prague had happened anything that wasn't only demonstration, but the demonstration had continued in the new — [searching for the word] — that it isn't finished, but continues. And the time is — [unclear]. That happened anything else — that it wasn't only demonstration, but also happened anything else.
I went there about five or six o'clock in the evening. There were only little groups of people, speaking together about what happened and what came, and what we knew, and what happened today and yesterday and so on. Nobody was leading the groups of people.
Civic Forum?
Civic Forum. And also that Mr. Havel is the leader, and that Dubček came to Prague, and that the students began a strike against the communists. He read some points in declaration — declaration, yes.
So every day I walked in this demonstration. And many friends — we met there with many friends and spoke together about it.
How old were you? What was your age?
15. 15, yes. So I had a big head.
It was also funny — on the first day, when I went to the demonstration, my father said to me: "Don't take these heavy shoes."
But also very strange — that not everybody, but many people, and also young people — that was very interesting for me — weren't in this demonstration and weren't in this excitement. They weren't excited from it. They were very cold and they didn't want to talk about it.
It took longer for them to get the information.
That was the answer.
And in the first week of the revolution, the information on TV was very colouring. Yes — colouring. Not true information. Because state Czech TV is statement — state-run. State is the owner — and the director of TV is state. And the government saw what is good on TV — so only good for government, only good for communists, and so on.
Our director in the high school was a very big communist. It was normal in this time that the director must be in the Communist Party. It was impossible — if something had power, wasn't in the Communist Party. So he was very stupid and not smart and not — [clever].
Also in my high school there didn't happen anything more — anything great — after the Revolution.
Discourse? Discussion?
Konkurs. Concourse. It's a hall — a long hall — [reaching for the word]. And konkurs — in every high position in government, in school, in factory, in firm — after Revolution was the free konkurs. We celebrated — what is the first and what is the best. Then this man will be the director.
The biggest changes for me were that we could go to Austria, yes. And the border opened for normal people. And it was terrible — everybody wanted to go to Austria, to Germany, and so on.
What was that like? Your experience to go to Austria, for a start?
So — I think everybody was surprised. The first vision — what is different. The Austrians were very polite to us. We could go free to museums — and in a train station, we couldn't — we needed to buy tickets. And it was very perfect because it was expensive for us. And I was in the biggest museum, you know, I don't know the name — I saw a picture of — and it was fantastic for me, in 15 years, for the first time.
And then — for me — I can believe in something who is in government, who is my ruler, that he is anybody who knows anything — who is not a stupid man, who is clever and smart and perfect. Mr. Havel is perfect, I think.
Modla?
Do you understand? Christus — Jesus Christus — was — is across the line, he is not angel. That's all — generally — not though that. And, you know, also a model. If model, I'm good —
I'm curious about — in school, what kind of ideological training did you receive? [Pause as he searches.] What kind of training in communist philosophy and thinking did you receive?
After Revolution?
No, no, before.
Before Revolution. [Czech in the original] — What kind of lessons did we have in communist thinking? Lessons. What lessons did you study?
What lessons did you have at school? In history, in geography, in political thinking?
Občanská nauka — civic education? Yes. So in basic school it was —
- Edo — the interviewee — Czech diminutive of Eduard. Confirmed from a photograph supplied by Mark in May 2026, showing Edo together with his father.
- Eduard — Edo's father, who shares his given name. The parent who gave the "don't take these heavy shoes" advice (Section 6) and, when Edo went to the demonstrations, told him "run if something — run away if something" — paralleling the same advice given by the math teacher's father in Czech Interview 01 ("Víťa, war is beginning") and by the parents of Dusty in Slovak Interview 01. Three different households across the late communist period, fathers giving sons and daughters identical practical advice about how to survive a public demonstration.
- Edo's surname
- The anti-communist history teacher at his Brno gymnasium — "very active against the communist system" — would be identifiable from the school records or from Mark's notes
- The theatre person who took the megaphone at Náměstí Svobody on the Monday evening — the first public OF announcement in Brno — would be identifiable from the circle around Petr Scherhaufer and Divadlo na provázku (see Interview 04). A strong candidate is Petr Oslzlý or another senior theatre figure from the Brno experimental scene.
- Jan Palach — the Czech university student who self-immolated on 16 January 1969 in Prague's Wenceslas Square in protest against the Soviet invasion. Všetaty, his birthplace, became a pilgrimage site after the communist regime removed his body from Olšany Cemetery in Prague in 1973 to discourage gatherings. The annual January demonstrations at Všetaty — and the police beatings of them — were a continuous low-grade resistance throughout Normalisation. Palach Week of January 1989, which the interviewee references at the opening of this transcript, was the first major anti-regime demonstration since 1969; police beat the demonstrators, and Václav Havel was arrested. It was the moment when many Czechs first understood the regime as vulnerable, ten months before the Velvet Revolution.
- Náměstí Svobody — Freedom Square in central Brno, the site of the daily demonstrations the interviewee attended
- OF — Občanské fórum — the Civic Forum, the umbrella opposition movement formed on 19 November 1989
- Alexander Dubček — the reform-communist leader of the 1968 Prague Spring; returned to public life in November 1989 and addressed crowds in Prague
- Václav Havel — the dissident playwright who became President in December 1989
- Konkurs — Czech for public competition; the procedure by which institutional leadership positions (school headmasters, factory directors, et cetera) were re-filled in the months after the Revolution
- Eduard's advice to Edo on shoes (Section 6) — "Don't take these heavy shoes. Why? Because when you will be running away, you will be slow." The casual practical wisdom of a father who has lived through Normalisation, given to a fifteen-year-old going to his first demonstration. Vivid, period-specific, universally legible. Strong candidate for a 30-second short-form piece — could be paired with present-day parental advice given to young protesters in CEE, building the construction-vs-deconstruction frame at human scale. The photograph of Edo and Eduard supplied in May 2026 captures the exact relationship the passage describes — including, on Edo's lapel, what appears to be the tricolour cockade he mentions wearing daily in Section 5.
- The classmates from the villages (Section 7) — exactly the same rural-urban political cleavage the Brno math teacher described from 1968 (Interview 02). "Many of my classmates were from a little village ... they got information at a slow time." The dynamic recurs across two interviews twenty years apart, captured by Mark across a decade of his MicroChronicle work. The cleavage that explains both 1968 and 2026.
- The theatre person with the megaphone (Section 4) — the first OF announcement in Brno's Náměstí Svobody, given by an unnamed theatre figure, almost certainly from the Divadlo na provázku circle. The interviewee's description — "it was so like a theatre. A little bit of theatre in the square" — corroborates Scherhaufer's account from Interview 04 of the Brno theatres as the operational engine of the Velvet Revolution.
- The school meeting in the gymnasium (Section 9) — the staff dividing into two camps in a Wednesday morning meeting and the students "whistling against" the conservative speaker. The smallest possible unit of democratic revolution captured in a single sentence.
- The first trip to Austria (Section 11) — "It was the basic of freedom. I could go to Austria without asking for it, without a communist card." The defining personal experience of the fall of the border for an entire generation; pairs editorially with similar passages in interviews 02 and 03.
- The need for a modla (Section 12) — his struggle to translate the Czech word modla — between idol, model, icon, Christ-figure — and his conclusion that "anybody whom the people could believe" was what Havel became. Editorially extraordinary as a teenager's account of how revolutions produce their own quasi-religious need for an embodied figure of trust. Directly applicable to 2026's relationship to disinformation: the studio's editorial line on rebuilding trust against authoritarian narratives is partly the question of how publics decide who to believe. The interviewee, at fifteen, is articulating the problem from the inside.