Jan Kofroň

„And we had the best teachers possible, because all of them were the people who were forbidden to work in public and who had come out of prison.” - „I guess that was dangerous...” -„ It was, of course. So we met in such a way that it rotated from one family to another. Each family had own number, because if perhaps something changed, that we were going to meet some other time, somewhere else, then you could phone. The phones were monitored, so you'd say on the phone: ‚Hey, Franta, write down an engine number, I forgot to tell you.' And there were three pairs of numbers, and after subtracting or adding thirty somewhere, then we knew when we were going to meet and what time we were going to meet. Yes, so it was a kind of rotation, we gathered in one place about once every three months."

"Every day at eight o'clock in the morning the newspapers were sold out. Because every day they published... they published the crimes which had happened in the concentration camps and prisons. And then the regime also loosened the grip in the sense that it was possible, under certain conditions, if you got an invitation from abroad, to go abroad. That was wonderful, [to go] behind the Iron Curtain, as they used to say. So my friends and I forged an invitation to Italy and they really bought it. We got a foreign typewriter, foreign paper, wrote it in Italian or something, an invitation to go somewhere, and we went to Italy. [We were] absolutely naive, because the commmunists exchanged us only the so-called hundred-dollar bill. We were allowed to have a hundred dollars exchanged by the bank. Well, I tell you, for a hundred dollars you could also sleep in a fancy hotel, one night, of course. So on the black market, because a lot of foreigners started to come here, and even if it was embarrassing, we started to address Germans, Italians: ‚Hello, please, we are students, we would like to..., can you exchange [money] for us?'. And then I remember that some of the Germans, they were setting high exchange rates, we had to buy it expensively as they needed to make money out of it. Well, and we got into Italy. That would be a curious story of how we lived there and how we slept in the countryside and the experiences we had. That was wonderful. Well, when we were in Ravenna, on the morning of August twenty-first, he came... the Salesians housed us there for free... and Donerico came and said: ‚Please, please, it seems you're being occupied.' After a while he brought a newspaper and there were the tanks and so on. So we went away, we wanted to go home. The border was closed. First we stayed in Venice for a while and there we took part in a big anti-Soviet demonstration."