I could also have said: 'alright then, I'll be good'.

“There was a moment at secret state police station when they interrogated me and told me that they had collected enough material on me to lock me up for ages. They were so persuasive that I came to believe them and I imagined how by the time I’d get out of jail my kids would be grown-ups. At that grave moment, God stood by me. I told them: ‘In that case I’d like to make a phone call to my wife and tell her that I’m not coming home tonight, so that she won’t end up running around town and looking for me like last time when you arrested me and nobody told her about my whereabouts’. After this they just told me to go home. They had been bluffing! But at that dreadful moment, God really stood by me because I could have easily given in and told them: ‘Ok, I’ll be good and cooperate with you’. Therefore I’m not judging those people who cooperated in a certain situation so strictly. It was hard to resist in certain situations, I mean when they were threatening you with long sentences and jail. They had a lot of information about most of people and they were very good at perfidiously exploiting that information to their advantage.”

• was born on 25 June 1942 in Boskovice in Moravia
• graduated from the Pedagogical Institute in Ostrava in 1963, studied Czech linguistics, history and arts, performed as a stage actor in the theater “Pod okapem” in Ostrava
• did his basic military service in 1963–1965
• worked in the education sector till 1968
• was editor of the “Tramp” magazine in 1968 - 1971
• was one of the founders of the Waterloo theater, played in the piece “Son of the regiment”
• arrested in 1972, held in custody and sentenced to 12 months for agitation, incarcerated from August 1972 to February 1973 in the Bory prison in Pilsen
• signed the Charta 77 in January 1977, went into Austrian exile in May 1977
• worked as an interpreter in a refugee camp and cooperated with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Austria
• worked for RFE/RL in Munich since 1983, was responsible for the press monitoring, later for the program “Voices and Receptions”
• returned to Prague in 1994, continued to work for RFE/RL till the shutdown of the Czech broadcasting of RFE/RL in 2002
• elected president of the Writer’s community in 2002
• lives in Prague and writes books