Oldřich Váca

"When I sat in the Czech Czech National Council, I would go to Prague every Monday morning and I had two suitcases. One contained various papers from the parliament, one was full of clean underwear and shirts. We would stay overnight in different places every day. I was told at the end of the meeting where to go and I took those suitcases and went by metro or by tram to some hotel where lodging was booked. One day, I sat on a double bed and another member of parliament entered. I looked at him and it was Jirka Machalik, the chairman of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. We would share a double room maybe three times and I would find out about my roommate only when I met him. I thought to myself, what should I do? Do I kill him? It's nonsense, he was elected and it needed to be respected."

“The last time I visited Germany with my mother, I was around 15. My pocket money for the trip was 20 German marks when a hot dog at the railway station would cost about five. Our relatives were not that bad off not to care about us. It was me who had issues with being given things. I refused to be a beggar. At the end, I did not go there for years and broke the contact with them. After mom's death, they were not direct relatives any more so it would be much more difficult to go there. So I visited them only after the revolution, in 1990.”

„Father used to say that it was unlikely that I would be admitted to a high school and that I would need to go to a trade school even though I had excellent grades. We thought that I might apply to an army academy which was a possibility how to bypass the problem. So, one day Colonel Prochazka from Zerovice came to visit, he had been dad's classmate. Mom was crying and kept walking away from the room while dad and colonel told me about the application proposal. There was a clause that we would have to stop any contact with our relatives in West Germany. I said that those people were the same relatives as those who live in Czechoslovakia and that they didn't do any bad to me. I thus refused the offer and the story of my encounter with army school ended. This encounter made me think, though, and a few years later, after five or six conscriptions I got the coveted certificate of Unfit for Service. But it was not easy.”