Havel: StB interrogators held him with Patočka in a break-room, then separated them — keeping Havel in custody and letting Patočka go; Havel was still imprisoned when Patočka died

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In a Czech Television interview, quoted by Radio Prague International in 2007, Václav Havel gave his own account of the last time he saw Charter 77 co-spokesman Jan Patočka alive: "We were both being interrogated and they left us together in a waiting room during a break at noon - they probably wanted to listen to what we had to say to one another. We talked about life and death and such things. They then took us for further interrogation and that's the last time I saw him. They kept me there and let him go, so I was there when he died. So it's a very strange memory of our last meeting."

The account places both men in StB custody on the same day, describes the interrogators' apparent surveillance motive for leaving them together, and has Havel kept in custody while Patočka was released — the reverse of the arrangement one might expect, given which of the two died. "So I was there when he died" locates Havel in prison at the time of Patočka's death, not at his bedside: the same article states that "Mr Havel learned of Patocka's death from an StB officer at Prague's Ruzyne prison." The wider record agrees — Havel was arrested on 14 January 1977 and held in Ruzyně until May, while Patočka was released after interrogation, hospitalised, and died on 13 March 1977.

This is Havel's own first-person testimony, but as it reaches this note it has passed through a broadcast retrospective's quotation of a television interview rather than a transcript read directly — see the [unverified-quote] flag.