The regime had turned it into a political matter

In March 1974, Dana Němcová set out to Rudolfov to attend a concert of underground bands: “Rudolfov was supposed to be a small festival, there were lots of people there, who were of course very conspicuous to the villagers, because they all had long hair and jeans, which was something completely alien in the small village, so it caused great panic and the party officials decided to call an emergency unit from Budějovice.” The participants and the visitors of the festival ran off in different directions, some of them went all the way to České Budějovice, where they hoped to find a hiding place in local pubs and restaurants. But they were wrong. In the center of Budějovice a hunt for the mops, (in Czech máničky, i.e. people with long hair), had started and even those who had not taken part in the festival got beaten up. The worst situation was at the train station, where patrols with dogs were installed into trains heading for Prague and Pilsen: “Later, when I was being interrogated, they uttered this sentence, thanks to which I realized that nothing good could be expected from these people, because they thought that it wasn't just a spontaneous event attended by young people; they were convinced that we must be a part of some kind of a secret organization, because whenever they needed to get such a huge number of people to one place, they had to organize it thoroughly.” Shortly after the operation in Rudolfov, almost 150 people were arrested or brought into the police station.