Juraj Braun

"When a whole group of tourists went to the Hofburg in Vienna, Milan and I told each other, and we were already prepared for this, that if there was an opportunity, we would just snap and we went to sort of film ourselves. We had a new film camera that we were filming ourselves with, and we were shooting next to the statue of Maria Theresa in front of the Hofburg - I was filming Milan, and Milan was taking footage of me. And then, as we were running away, we filmed ourselves running away. So we ran away, took a taxi on the street, and got taken to this hotel where the group was, and it was such a working-class neighbourhood in Vienna, where maybe those people were also cooperating with the Czechoslovak police, we don't know. So, one was waiting downstairs under the window in the hotel, and the other one went up to the room. I still went to see the one in charge of the room to see if, by any chance, we would discover those passports there. And we didn't discover them, we didn't find them. So we dropped those suitcases of ours, Milan's and mine, down through the window. Then, I went next to that concierge to say that I had forgotten something and returned to the group. And there was a taxi waiting for us around the corner, the same taxi that had brought us there, and we made him wait around the corner, and we paid him very well, of course. And then the taxi driver took us to some of these friends and people we knew before. Before that, they smuggled and took our diploma and our documents to Austria. Because one was not allowed to have anything suspicious with you. Not a medical diploma, nor any certificates - or matriculation certificates, or graduation certificates, or state examination certificates, nothing like that. So, both Milan and I arranged it through friends who brought it out in advance. And then, since we didn't have a passport, those friends we had in Vienna took us to the Fremdenpolizei, as it were. That's the alien police in Vienna, and they made us; I still have it as a souvenir, a kind of alien passport, a kind of Nansenpas - that's what it was called. It just allowed us to get out of Austria and into another country."

"We stayed in that Slovakia and we still held that '68 in our hearts. So, I was on the so-called strike committee in November and December 1968. It was the only high school in Bratislava that went on strike with college students to demand freedom of speech and no censorship to be declared again. For the Russian troops to withdraw or for Czechoslovakia to declare neutrality. Because if Czechoslovakia was neutral, the Russian troops would have to pack up and leave. And the people were revolutionary, even the professors. Some. And some already at that time, two or three months after 1968, they started to normalise, and the later after 1968, the worse and sadder it got. - Well, that's self-censorship, isn't it? Both self-censorship and forced censorship. They fired the principal of the school, who was there as a principal in the high school; he couldn't be a principal there anymore. Two deputy principals were temporarily put in charge of the management of that Novohradská. The few good professors we had had to leave the school. That strike committee of ours existed for about a week or two, and then it all started to get twisted. I think, maybe, I don't know the exact dates, but I guess from January onwards, it ceased to exist. And they had already started investigating who, what and how. And they had already started petitions that, well, actually, those Soviet troops were necessary to prevent the counter-revolution. What pained me was that I saw my classmates who had previously been against the Russian invasion or had protested when those five countries came to Czechoslovakia. Suddenly, they had already started to say that it was needed and that we could never become free anyway. And that socialism was actually better for us. That's when I started to realise how these people were warping their character, that this is not good, and that this is not the life I want to live. So the attacks on the basis of my Jewish identity, '68, and then that period of how those people started to treat each other...There was also such anger among those people that people stopped trusting each other and telling each other how things were."