Nine conversations recorded in Brno and Žilina between approximately 1990 and 1994, in the immediate aftermath of the Velvet Revolution — when the events were months old, not decades. Several interviewees were colleagues at the same Brno gymnasium; others were reached through that network. These are not retrospective accounts; they are first impressions, spoken while the outcome was still uncertain and the texture of daily life under communism was still fresh in the body.
"On the 16th of August it was my wedding day with Vlastik. And on 21 August my father woke me up and told me: 'Víťa, war is beginning.'" — Eyewitness to the Prague Spring, the Soviet invasion five days after her wedding, and the Velvet Revolution twenty-one years later.
A Brno Pioneer leader reflects on the structures of loyalty and belief that organised daily life under communism, and what it meant to have led children through rituals whose foundations were dissolving.
A colleague at the same gymnasium who ran underground theatre during the Normalisation years — art as a form of civic survival. Account of the "renaissance of the school" after 1989 and of Eduard's election as principal.
One of Brno's leading theatre directors on the role of theatrical performance in the years when public speech was impossible — and what happened to theatre once the revolution made speech free again.
Son of Eduard — the post-1989 elected principal of Gymnázium Sirotkova — Edo was fifteen years old when the Velvet Revolution arrived in Brno. The youngest voice in the Czech archive; the revolution seen from a school desk.
A Communist Party member at a Brno ball-bearing foundry who did not take his Party card back when the revolution came — one of the few voices in the archive that did not. His wife paid the social cost. The archive's counterpoint to the mass exodus from the Party.
A Masaryk University academic reflects on the post-1989 transformation of Czech intellectual and institutional life — the people who stayed, the people who left, and what the university looked like once the political loyalty requirements were removed.
A second Masaryk University interviewee whose name has not yet been confirmed from contemporaneous notes. Identity to be established from the audio master. Transcript held pending identification.
"We put the posters on our bodies. We stuck them on our bodies and just said: 'You can come and read it.'" — A student at the University of Transport and Communications in Žilina who helped organise the strike committee from November 1989. The only Slovak interview in the archive.