Jindra Čapek

"They walked into our compartment and she started giving orders: Show me, untie this and that. She started to harass this old lady who was crying so much when she left the kids... she had this suitcase tied with some string, well, terrible. Now she comes to me and I give her my German passport, where I had my visa. She took it and said: Welcome to Czechoslovakia. And she started smiling at me, suddenly changed her mask. She asked where I was going. I said, "To see my father in Budějovice. I said, do you want to see the luggage? She said: No, leave it, you don't have to show it. It's all right. She put the entry stamp in my passport. She thanked me and gave it to me. I couldn't understand one thing, how she treated those Czech pensioners, who were actually her compatriots, you could say... and me, who as a... actually she recognized immediately... we were talking in Czech, of course I have a Czech name... she saw that I was an emigrant, former. Actually I was no longer an emigrant, I was already a German citizen and a revanchist - so an enemy. And she was so polite to me. I thought, why? The money, the foreign exchange played a role."

"It was only years later that I found out... I spoke to a former policeman who was one at the time. He told me that they were instructed to leave the emigrants alone. Because they needed the foreign currency. As a foreign national, I had to exchange thirty West German marks a day, one to five, so that was for a wonderful contribution of money. They tried to make sure that when I came back home afterwards, I wouldn't talk in such a way that I was being harassed. So I wouldn't discourage people from coming here. On the contrary, they were very friendly. I was amazed."

"In the morning my father went mushroom picking. We kids turned on the radio. And suddenly it was there. Prague was calling, not for help, but simply that the radio might not be on for much longer. We all know exactly how it was then from the documentaries. But now we knew that the Russians had come. We were sitting by the radio and my father was coming back with mushrooms. He had a basket full of mushrooms. I remember, like today, saying, Dad, the Russians are here. And he was holding the basket of mushrooms, and his face was pale. It was like they drained the blood out of him. Within half a minute, his face was completely white. I thought he was gonna get away with it. Even though he suspected it much more than we did, it still took a terrible toll on him as a person who had been persecuted in his own way and just had these experiences. He came up to the hut and now we started discussing it. We watched the radio for two days and he said, no way are we going to Budějovice now. You didn't know what was going to happen, if it was going to be violent. We were actually living in a state of war. Even I have to say that I enjoyed it a little bit. As long as one doesn't have some horrors in front of one's eyes, even such things as excitement for a 14-year-old boy, it's suddenly such an experience. Of course, we kids couldn't have accurately predicted the consequences."