In January 1977 the writer, dissident, and future president of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel, was arrested by the Communist regime for his part in organizing the groundbreaking Czechoslovak human rights initiative, Charter 77. After his release four months later, he wrote a detailed account of his time in detention and then hid it so well that he forgot where it was. In 2014, three years after his death, it was found among the papers of his close friend Zdeněk Urbánek. Paul Wilson’s translation of the report, the first in English, will be published this fall as Lost and Found: Hidden Notes on My First Incarceration. The text below is drawn from that account.
—The Editors

If the Czechoslovak secret police truly understood the events they so carefully monitor, they would have realized long before Charter 77 appeared that something like it was in the works, and they might have avoided the shock that the launch of the Charter gave them.

For Charter 77 didn’t just drop out of a clear blue sky. Its appearance was a natural outcome of the circumstances that gave rise to it. On December 11, 1976, several people from different intellectual circles came together in the shared belief that something ought to be done. Out of their discussions came the intention to write a declaration that would include a concise analysis of the state of human rights in our country and would conclude by announcing the creation of a permanent body concerned with this matter. This first meeting was soon followed by two larger sessions in which the text of the declaration was written and edited and a method of gathering signatures agreed upon.¹

Our experience thus far had taught us that gathering a large number of signatures in support of such a declaration would have to be done with all possible dispatch because the police would find out about it in a matter of days and move to block it. Nevertheless we decided to gather signatures discreetly over Christmas, hoping that the attention of the police would be less intense during the holiday season. The technique of gathering signatures was worked out so that it wouldn’t involve any unusual activity, since the people who met for this purpose were in regular touch anyway and no undue suspicions would be aroused.

The plan worked, and by Wednesday, December 29, at 4:00 PM—the deadline we’d set for completion—all the signature slips (there were substantially more than we expected: 241) were assembled in one place. We immediately made several copies of an alphabetical list of the signatories and attached them to copies of the declaration. I was on edge all that day, quite pointlessly as it turned out, since as far as we could tell there was no indication that the police suspected anything. We conferred with friends on the next steps, drank some bubbly, and, satisfied with a job well done, went our separate ways.

At the beginning of January, despite our efforts to draw as little attention to ourselves as possible, the police began to suspect that something was afoot. It appears that they got their first precise information about the Charter declaration and the initial list of signatories sometime on January 5, from France, from the printing house of Le Monde, which was set to publish the declaration the following day. Now, of course, the police began to realize the significance and the extent of the matter, and we think that sometime in the night between the 5th and the 6th of January they mobilized a small team of officers, the first consequence of which was our notorious ambushing at noon the following day. We were in a race against the clock, and we lost by just a couple of hours.

On the morning of Thursday, January 6, Ludvík Vaculík and Pavel Landovský came to pick me up.² We drove to our friend Zdeněk Urbánek’s house, where we got everything ready to hand over to the state authorities and to mail out to the signatories. Earlier that morning I had noticed a car with two men in it parked about a hundred meters from our home, but I hadn’t drawn any hasty conclusions. At Zdeněk’s, however, we knew with absolute certainty that we were under surveillance: a Volga police cruiser was parked a short distance from his building, and another vehicle was prowling back and forth in a small park just across the street. We now knew they would follow our every move, but we decided to stick to our original plan.

As we set off around noon, the Volga fell in behind us. We soon realized that we were being tracked by several cars and that we’d have a hard time shaking them. Even so, Pavel—out of some kind of chauffeur’s pride—tried to lose them by driving wildly around the Prague neighborhood of Hanspaulka. The only advantage we gained by these maneuvers was that we found ourselves momentarily alone in a side street where I was able to cram at least some of the envelopes into a postbox. While driving through the intersection just past the former French high school we found ourselves boxed in by several cruisers. Policemen piled out and stopped traffic from entering the intersection, then yelled at us to get out of our car. They put us in separate vehicles, confiscated our bags, and drove us off to their headquarters in Bartolomějská Street.

The ambush must have looked like a scene from a gangster film. Passersby stopped to stare, perhaps thinking they were witnessing a movie shoot, because amid all the uproar they could see the familiar face of Pavel Landovský. As the police were taking us away, I thought: This is a fine way to launch our struggle for human rights.

While the initial interrogations by the police were what you might describe as scattershot, done purely to get their bearings (they hadn’t yet decided how to handle the whole matter), on Monday, January 10, the interrogations became more focused. At that time my interrogator was a certain Major Hudec, a tall, relatively polite man with an odd, rasping laugh, not deliberately sarcastic but rather unpleasant all the same. I refused—as did all the others—to say anything about the Charter, and because Major Hudec seemed incapable of having an interesting discussion, we spent a rather gloomy time together, long periods of silence alternating with short periods of the same, oft-repeated dialogue, which went roughly like this: “If I do something wrong and I’m a man, I’m going to come clean! We’ll take an hour to write it up and you can go home! I don’t get you—are you a man?” “But I haven’t done anything wrong!” “If you haven’t done anything wrong, then for God’s sake just say so. If I do something wrong and I’m a man, I’m going to come clean! We’ll take an hour to write it up and you can go home! I don’t get you—are you a man?” It went on like that (in my plays I call repetitions like that “circular dialogue”) each time followed by silence. And then again: “If I do something…” Major Hudec hammered away at me for two days, for ten or eleven hours at a time, despite the fact that it got him nowhere.

At first I wondered how someone with such a lack of imagination could have become a major. But later it occurred to me that I may have been underestimating him: the sense of futility that radiated from him began to make me feel physically ill. My head ached, I felt dizzy, and I was constantly battling a strange lethargy that made me feel as though I were about to faint. Was that precisely what Hudec was after? He clearly had two possibilities in mind: either I would lose my nerve and spill the beans, or I would keep my head about me but then return home in the evening so beaten down I’d have no energy left for the tasks that awaited me—answering questions from the reporters phoning from Vienna, Bonn, or Paris for comments, or consulting with other Chartists, gathering information, and so on. In short, I wouldn’t be able to function as a spokesman for Charter 77. So Hudec’s approach clearly wasn’t as pointless as it seemed, though it was not successful: my nerves held out and I was able to carry out my evening duties.

On Tuesday evening Hudec invited me—as usual—to come back the next morning. So on Wednesday morning I showed up at the gatehouse of Ruzyně Prison and said that Major Hudec had summoned me, and the guard asked me to wait. I sat in the waiting room for half an hour, trying to comfort a woman who was in tears. At last the guard came back and told me there was no one by that name here. I asked if I was free to go home, and he merely shrugged. So home I went.

It was about nine o’clock, and at first I rejoiced in my unexpected freedom. But I was in a quandary: What was I supposed to do now? I had become so used to these daily interrogations that I suddenly found myself faced with a desolate and hopeless void. Should I sit at home and wait for them to realize their mistake and come and pick me up? Or should I grasp the opportunity and go into hiding? But where could I go? Other Chartists were either at work or in Ruzyně Prison being interrogated, and spending my time on anything other than the Charter seemed absurd.

Eventually I decided on a rather strange solution, somewhere between disappearing and flaunting my presence in broad daylight: I would go and sit in the Slavia café. (To explain: the Slavia had long been an important part of my life. I was a regular there for most of my youth. It was there that I experienced my literary beginnings, and engaged in endless, intense discussions with friends and fellow students. I even met Olga, my future wife, there. But it had been a good fifteen years since I stopped frequenting the Slavia, and I couldn’t remember when I’d last been there.) I sat by a window, ordered a coffee, and mulled things over. Slowly but surely I began to suspect that it wasn’t a mistake after all, and that the entire anomalous situation, when everyone but me was in Ruzyně, signaled something far more ominous: What if at that moment they were deciding to alter my status from witness to suspect?

The next morning the situation became even more ominous. Everyone else was being interrogated, but around me there was this mysterious silence. I was beset by a deep uneasiness again, and I went to a pub in Žitná Street to ward it off with lunch and several beers. At noon Jiří Němec showed up, along with Milan Balabán, an evangelical pastor and one of the signatories.³ We read the newspapers and analyzed the campaign they were waging against us, which was already underway: “outraged workers” were being quoted in all the newspapers and appearing on television and radio.

We spent that afternoon and evening in one of the “conspiratorial apartments” where meetings and consultations were taking place. We drafted a document about the education system; we assessed our situation and shared what we knew. At about 10:00 PM I decided to ignore my unease, go home, have a decent sleep, take a bath, and shave. We didn’t know whether they had already learned where we were meeting and had the apartment under surveillance—probably not—but that day everything seemed suspicious to us, and none of our precautions felt adequate.

When we left the apartment Pavel, who was supposed to drive me to my car, asked me to walk a hundred meters behind him. (The point of this escaped me, but I didn’t question it so as not to seem stupid.) He took a circuitous route—it was a part of Prague I was unfamiliar with—walked twice around the block, then somehow got far ahead of me and I began to lose him. I started running to catch up, but when he saw me running he began to run too, and suddenly we were both pelting like mad through the empty streets, and when we finally met up, quite exhausted, at his car, we were at a loss to explain why we hadn’t just walked together in a normal fashion.

At home I slept and then got up early because I wanted to have a quiet bath before they came for me. When I had finished my rather extensive ablutions, the doorbell rang, I answered it, and in the doorway stood Major Hudec along with two tough-looking fellows. He chuckled in his raspy fashion and said in a jovial tone, “Why, Mr. Havel, wherever have you been?”

He seemed to be admonishing me for not showing up at the prison myself, a not entirely absurd idea given how anxious I’d been over the previous two days. If I’d been able to follow my innermost feelings, I would have much preferred to bring the whole game to an end and turn myself in. My state of mind was akin to that of a man wandering through a city where on every street corner there is a “WANTED” poster with his face on it.

I asked Hudec whether I was being taken in as a witness or as a suspect, and he chuckled and said, “As a witness, of course.” Nevertheless I took the emergency toiletries kit I’d been carrying around with me for ten days, said good-bye to Olga, and off I went.

I returned 127 days later.

Perhaps it was on Monday—but more probably not until Tuesday—that a robust man with a lush beard turned up at my interrogation. (At the time I was being interrogated every day.) I gathered at once that he wasn’t with the secret police, not only because they typically don’t have beards but also because he wasn’t their type. The interrogators immediately got respectfully to their feet, while he more or less ignored them and offered to shake my hand, which rather surprised me. He introduced himself as “Dr. Fremund, senior prosecutor in the attorney general’s office.” We all sat down, and the new arrival began to speak. His tone was serious, he spoke to the point, and there was something soothing, even stimulating, in his voice. He began with a brief prologue in which he announced that I was being officially detained.

Then he briefly explained his reasons. Basically, he said that many foreign journalists were turning to me, as a spokesman for the Charter, and many more would probably do so, and that my statements were, he said, getting me into trouble, and it could be expected that I’d get even deeper into trouble, and so the feeling was that it would be better for me to be shielded from all of that for now, in case I eventually got more deeply involved, which would be very silly of me, particularly because those journalists often misrepresented what I said and twisted it in ways that turned my statements into attacks on the republic. Of course, it would certainly be possible to investigate my crime without locking me up, but it was in my own interest as well as the general interest that I not carry on as I had been, which is precisely what my being in custody was meant to prevent. Then he asked me whether I was familiar with my indictment and whether I wanted to say anything about it that he could add to his statement.

I said something along these lines, that Paragraph 98 of the criminal code assumes a person has acted out of hostility to the socialist system of government, but I didn’t consider myself an enemy of that system, and that what led me to do what I did was an attempt to contribute to its improvement.

Dr. Fremund said we didn’t need to add that because I had said it in my earlier statements, and was there anything else?

I said I was being accused of maintaining contact with some vaguely defined hostile centers abroad but that I had no such contacts.

Dr. Fremund said we didn’t have to add that because I had said it in my earlier statements.

Next he gave me a form to sign, and I signed it, thus acknowledging that I was officially in custody.

Then he asked me in a friendly tone if I had any requests, any particular needs, any complaints. I didn’t immediately know what to say, but then—if I’m not mistaken—I asked whether my wife could bring me some books.

Dr. Fremund said that unfortunately he had to disappoint me, but people under indictment were entitled to read books only from the prison library.

Then he stood up and offered me his hand, the interrogators politely got to their feet again, and Dr. Fremund asked them where he might find a comrade Horák. One of the interrogators leaped to the door and offered to take him there. Both of them left the room.

On the whole I have this to say about Dr. Fremund: during my stay in Ruzyně I met him a total of four times, and each of those encounters had one basic element in common. Each time the news he delivered was bad, but he delivered it in a way that left me feeling pleased, calmed, encouraged, if not exactly exhilarated. In short, the encounter always somehow created a moment of clarity in the general darkness that surrounded me in Ruzyně. At the same time, I knew very well that this man could never bring me any good news, and yet—as incomprehensible as it seems—I always, each time, succumbed to the calming effect he had on me.

I have often asked myself: What kind of person was he, really? In the whole anonymous machinery of the security and justice system, he stood apart: the full beard, those inconspicuous attempts at dry humor, the aura of comfort he radiated. And yet there was no genuine human warmth in him. His behavior was matter of fact, measured, official. What was he like at home? I don’t know why, but I can’t help feeling that if he wasn’t a confirmed bachelor, then certainly, as a husband or a father, he was one of those domestic tyrants with a lot of minor idiosyncrasies and peculiar habits that his nearest and dearest have to respect unconditionally, but for which they silently loathe him. At the same time, they yield entirely to some cold charisma in his personality, so that there is practically no chance for them to rebel. Even if he were married, he undoubtedly has in his nature some traits of a confirmed bachelor: a selfish clinging to old habits, the inability to be a real partner to anyone.

But whatever he’s really like, he is uncommonly well suited to his job. He has the ability to communicate anything to anyone in a persuasive and reassuring manner. I can imagine him arguing in front of a tribunal that I be given the death penalty, but doing it in a way that would leave me delighted with his speech.

I went through the release procedure that May in a kind of half-dream. Only six weeks before, I had been convinced that I wouldn’t see the normal world again for another five years, and now suddenly I was about to return to it. Naturally, I couldn’t stop myself from feeling elated, but at the same time I was trembling with anxiety, wondering how they might be preparing to stitch me up.

At about one o’clock the whole procedure was concluded and a guard led me through the Ruzyně Prison complex to the main gate. Olga and Zdeněk Urbánek were already waiting on the other side. I walked through the gate, and then an odd thing occurred: I felt that everything was just as it had been before, that in fact nothing had happened, that I hadn’t been anywhere, or had been away for only the weekend. The trees, the cars, the people, the sky—everything that I had missed so badly and that I thought would seem almost unbelievable when I saw it again didn’t surprise me at all. I took it all in my stride. It was as though my prison psychosis had utterly fallen away, and I behaved confidently and quite normally. It was only gradually that I came to recognize how my psychophysical state had led me astray—because for the longest time, I was anything but normal. The feeling I had was no more than a superficial mimicry of normality. The world in which I suddenly found myself again was so like the one I had lived in for more than forty years that it created in me the illusion that I, too, had not changed and that therefore I could go on moving in it the way I had moved in it all my life.

Olga and Zdeněk and I embraced (he brought me flowers), then we put my things in the car and drove off. And all at once I burst into tears. I was shocked, because the last time I had cried like that I was still a child. I apologized to Olga and Zdeněk, I said I didn’t understand it and found it terribly embarrassing. It did not fit with my illusion that I was calm and in control. “Some warrior for human rights,” I said to myself.

We drove home, carried my things upstairs. I was surprised at how colorful our flat was. We drank whiskey, I smoked the American cigarettes Zdeněk had picked up for me on the way to Ruzyně, and we talked about everything under the sun.

I couldn’t sleep, nor did I want to. All night long I read through piles of Charter texts that were waiting on my desk—documents, press releases, analyses, essays, documentation from legal workplace disputes, and so on. It made for thrilling reading, allowing me to take another step toward understanding everything that had gone on outside prison in my absence. I had missed the first and most important phase of what could be called the heroic era of the Charter. Now I was constantly amazed at how many smart, courageous texts had been written, how many things had happened, how the latent creativity of so many people had blossomed, and how so many people had grown. I was filled with admiration at how many didn’t simply sign the Charter and leave it at that but rather understood their signature as a commitment to doing real work.

Of course the regime had helped all this along by the enormous pressure it brought to bear on Chartists. In some ways everything on the outside was worse than I had expected: I had absolutely not imagined the sheer ruthlessness of the persecution (dozens and dozens of sackings, the rigged workplace trials, the expulsions from the Revolutionary Trade Union Movement, the constant surveillance, the forty-eight-hour detentions, the interrogations, the confiscation of personal documents, the cutting off of telephone service, etc., etc.).

It forced even those who generally felt isolated and so would not normally have stood up for themselves to do so. The bare necessity of self-defense led many of them to shed their last remaining inhibitions. They began to call things by their proper names, and thus they enabled the truth to come out fully. I was fascinated, too, by how a foundational principle of the Charter—the notion of diversity of background—had become reality. Without force or persuasion, different groups became imbued with the same spirit, while at the same time retaining their own identity. Protestants addressed their congregations; Catholics addressed theirs; former Communists spoke to their traditional partners. It was a chorus of different ideas, styles, approaches, themes, and ideas, and all of it with a sense of concord that no one had organized, all aimed at the same thing: a peaceful, civil, but uncompromising expression of truth, a persuasive defense of basic human rights and human dignity. (How different was the tone of all these texts from that of the official campaign against the Charter, with its hatred, hysteria, and vulgarity!)

I couldn’t take my eyes off what I was reading, and I wanted to learn as much as possible as quickly as I could in case they really did come to arrest me on Monday.