Jiří Henych

“I didn’t see the regime in any way, we were little children, we marched along as pioneers [the Communist replacement for the Boy Scouts - transl.] on May Day and thought we were bringing happiness to humanity, because they mixed our heads up, quite simply we were manipulated. I remember how in national school one teacher, Mrs Čejková, I still remember her name, we were in the second or third year, and she told us, I’ll never forget that: ‘Children, if you hear something bad about our comrade president at home, tell me about it.’ She was forcing us to denounce our parents. Well, not forcing, but simply suggesting it. On the other hand it was a peaceful childhood because we didn’t understand what was going on. Realisation only started to set in when we were adults, when we saw the people who had the opportunity to go to the West and who came back and told us about it, they opened our eyes to a completely different world. That’s why I wanted to leave, because I didn’t want to stay here, I didn’t want to marry and have children in this country.”

“I don’t know if it was a former concentration camp, but it was the sort of building like they had in concentration camps, it was probably a remnant from the war. That was the American zone, and it housed fugitives from the East, not only from the Czech Republic, but from the whole eastern Socialist camp. And they wanted to check what sort of persons we were, which I can understand. They didn’t lock us in, you could go out; you had to tidy up, a bit like at military service. And you waited there until the commission acknowledged whether your reasons were sufficient to justify them granting you political asylum, or not.”

“I left for a three-day trip to Vienna, that was a bus with about forty people and we all had just one joint passport. The passport was valid for forty tourists. So I didn’t have any document at all. And I was the only young man, the rest were around forty to fifty years old, I was the only young person. So I was regarded as a potential runaway. So when we came to Vienna, I was informed by one person from the bus that this man, and he was pointed out to me, was someone I should watch out for. That he might be a secret [agent], that I should be careful. We came to Vienna, you can’t take pretty much anything with you on a three-day trip, just two bags, you can’t take two suitcases for three days. And I made use of the first opportunity and, quite simply, legged it.”

“With great difficulty, that’s a well-known fact about the Swiss - that they’re of themselves very reserved people. With great difficulty, when I compare with the current situation, how my Swiss wife is being accepted here and how they approached me back then in Switzerland, it’s completely different. But I have to say that I was helped by the fact that I had married a Swiss. But even her family, that was very, very difficult to start with, because in their eyes I was some sort of troglodyte from the Carpathians.”