"So it's not like the fairy tale had a happy ending. Let's see where we've been so naive since '89, because we believed, so to speak, in good, truth, and love. And I mean it literally and quite seriously. But we were terribly naive, because most people thought just about money."
"I came back. And because I behaved normally and freely in England, I met with the emigrants. I was on the BBC, on the radio and so on. I came back and they came for me. So when someone comes for you, my husband and I still lived like that in that acting boarding school, so someone knocked on the door and there were two of them coming for me. Well, then they took me away to Bartolomějská in Prague; it was an centre of the state police, so in Liberec there is Pastýřská street, which was just the same. And they took me there, they picked me up in the morning and I had to spend all day there listening to stupid questions. But from a psychological point of view, the experience was very surprising to me, that the moment this happened to you, I froze like an icicle and I wasn't afraid. It was completely... I suddenly found myself, I looked at it as something that was happening to someone else. And it was like a stupid movie, some kind of grotesque or something. That there was one who wanted to be good, and the other one was evil. One shouted at me and the other reassured me, he wanted to calm me down all the time and brough a cup of coffee. Well, and then from me... they wanted to know what I was doing there every day, who I was dating. I told them, 'I don't remember.' I turned it around, saying, 'Do you remember exactly what you did at 9:00 in the morning on August 13?' But it seemed completely logical to me, so I played it on this. Well, they left me... then they left me, sitting there alone for two hours and they said, maybe she'll get scared or soften or she'll be hungry and then she'll be workable. And they went back and started again. And when they saw that they would get nothing from me, they quit and started it differently. They started offering me cooperation. To become an informant from the theatre cooperating with the police. I said, 'Never in my life.' "
"It also worked, the theater became such a center in Prague. Where did the students from the National Class then run, because there were many students. So they came to that theater. And we convened a special meeting during the night of November 17th and a 18th for the afternoon on the 18th. Vašek Havel was not in Prague at the time, he left the week before the celebrations again, as they always locked him up, so he went to Hrádeček, to his cottage. And said that he would call me. So he called sometime on 18th, and I said, 'Well, we convened a meeting here overnight for the theater of all the theatergoers.' Well, on the afternoon of November 18, the theater was packed to the ceiling."
Vlasta Křížová Gallerová was born on July 21, 1942. After graduating from high school and a short work break in the factory and in Barrandov, she studied History and Theory of Theater at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. Since her studies, she was a part of not only theatrical but also dissident environments. In the 1970s, after spending a month at a Shakespearean school in England, she had to be questioned at the state security, where she refused to offer cooperation. In the 1970s, she worked as a dramaturg in the Pardubice and Liberec theaters, and from the 1980s in the then Realistic Theater in Prague. In the second half of the 1980s, they began to perform the plays of previously banned authors, and in November 1989 they actively participated in the Velvet Revolution. The theater was closed in 1998, the whole ensemble was fired and the witness has been teaching ever since.
