Sisyphus

"I don't really care about it. I am a man of religious belief. I practice my faith every day. I don't hope to judgement on this earth. But I do hope if I go into my after life, there will be fair judgement. I don't believe in fair judgement here."

"We also had our own singing revolution, call this thing later the National Song Festivals. It was traditional in Baltic states. This is now recognized as world heritage by UNESCO. Song festivals are our cultural heritage. I like to sing. I was a participant in boys choir. later as a student after study, I like to sing among friends. But that open singing, once in secret, by massive people, that was giving strength that we are unbroken. Nobody can push us out of our way. In a similar way, not only carol or mass carol singing, but also in great activities of more than Lithuanian music, directly sang plans – more than composers – with compositions, they are talking about destiny of a nation. People listened to it. About the destiny maybe in symbolic forms. In the changing time, changing epochs, how the genuine culture has been persecuted, how was it eliminated, how does the genuine culture thrive to resist, to survive. It was understood very clearly that it was about us today. It was not about the ancient times, about ages of history. It was about us today. It was in literature. It was also in literature in such an elliptical content of sense of human beings. That sense of human beings was not the fake picture of happiness in future communism. Your life is true. You have to be consistent in your values, in your understanding, in your solidarity with similarly-thinking people."

"We don't do what we do based on calculation of self-interests. We do it based on faith and ideal. We want to push for great social change. Fighting toward that goal, we have to make sacrifice."

I was there in the Prague Spring demonstration. My mother came back from work, sat on the chair and cried. “The Russians were disgusting.” I saw the shooting. I was devastated. Terrible. I was 22 at the time.

“When I interviewed Havel in the early mid-80s, I think it was on the mid-80s, he was just leaving prison. Nobody would guess that one day he would be the president. Back to those days he was a very modest and witty person. He was a very unique president in the sense that he filled the need of being a very honest and creative president. To give the country something, not to take anything for himself. Power, or something.”

“I understand opposing communism if very difficult. Why do I still push it? First, when the future generation think of the predecessors, they would not feel shame for us because we did nothing when facing tyranny and dictatorship. This thought is very inspiring for me. Also, I understand the world and the more advanced civilizations. I hope that we will bring freedom, self-governing, and justice, back to our society, to our people. We cannot just watch and admire others.“

“I was honored to be on the first list of the people to be arrested, which means the communist really considered me one of the top 6000 enemies of the system. To me, it’s an honor, because I got arrested on the first night of the martial law. We spent around 2 weeks in the prison in Wroclaw. On Christmas eve, we were put into trucks, with no window and they started driving us. We didn’t know where we were going, we were afraid that we might be going to another country, like Czechoslovakia, or Soviet Union, nobody knew where we were going. We ended up driving for maybe one and half hour, maybe, we found out that we were still in Poland, We were in Gorzów Wielkopolski, which is a small town between Wrocław and Krakow, They had an old German prison there which they emptied out, and they prepared for all the solidarity leaders, and that we our internment camp, where I spent another 5.5month.“

“I was walking in the Liubukou neighborhood. Suddenly, there was an explosion. I didn’t know what it was. I only saw the smoke. No one knew what to do. We could see almost nothing. A girl behind be fainted. I picked her up and went toward the roadside. When I was moving passing the bicycle lane toward the pedestrian lane, where most students were walking on, we were closer to the automobile lane, tanks speeded in. high speed from behind. It was very sudden. I had no time to think clear. The only thing I saw was the barrel of the tank. I didn’t see the entire body of the tank. Neither I got a clear picture of the environment. Intuitively, I pushed the girl away toward the pedestrian lane. I had no space to move, lost my balance and fell. That tank crushed my body.“

“I am essentially a cold war product. That was part of my career. I built my career partially on the cold war business, but also on the reform movement, because I understood the cold war had no positive way out of everything, anything. It led mainly to the hot war. So we had to find ways to replace cold war with something else.“

“They accused me of being the general command of the rebellion in Southwest China. They said, because you went there, Guangdong had turmoil. They put me in the most wanted list for ten years. My name was given to all airports, train stations, and bus stations. Had I been spotted, I would have been arrested. I heard that it might be more. Friends in Guangdong told me that my photo was placed in the airport security check point. Many photos, but you were among them. The second you would appear, they would have detained you and transferred you to the police. Because of that, my workplace fired me. My apartment was taken away. I lost my teaching job at No. 8 High School. Since then, I lost everything. Some people said, intellectuals did not understand real life. Wrong. Intellectuals know the real life best.”