"I'm sure it was very interesting. Don't forget that you couldn't go to such closed zones in the USSR. You could only go there for military reasons, they had military ships. Until 1960, for example, you couldn't go to Odessa, only with a special permit. There were many no-go zones in the USSR. We were glad we could get there, normally we wouldn't have been able to get there. We were there for two months, and because it was so far north, food was carted. Like meat from New Zealand, it's still closer than Moscow. Milk from Japan - it's closer. It was more expensive, but the cost of shipping made up for it, so we sort of functioned there, and in the end our whole squad got salmonella or something. We were lying in the children's ward, they didn't know where to put us."
"We were just told by the guys that the faculty (I mean physics) has seismic machines and they measured that there was some kind of explosion around Kiev, that there was some kind of trouble, that we must not talk about it. We laughed about it, we were twenty years old, guys. On the twenty-eighth we went home, of course officially you couldn't go home, that you would come to the station in Kiev and buy a ticket - I want to go to Olomouc. They'd say you're probably sick in the head. No, you had to have permission to sell you a ticket. The way we solved it was to go around, take the train to Brest (that's a station in Belarus), cross over there dry-footed to Poland, where they have to let you through - and from there to Warsaw by train. We walked around Warsaw all day, and we arrived home on the 30th [of April] and everybody was like, 'Jesus, a power station exploded over there!' We didn't know anything, nobody told us anything. Of course, after a while they tried, as they always did in the USSR, not to give information, to conceal what they could. They thought they would put it out somehow, but it was such a disaster that there was nothing to be done. The worst thing was that in Sweden meteorologists had already measured high pollution from the explosion. The Russians could no longer hide it, they had to admit it."
"Well, as I was saying. The first shock was cockroaches everywhere, it was scary. The hygiene, that was something. The toilets were a disaster. The next day we thought we'd go to the shop. When we got there, I said, 'Kids, I'm not going to be able to eat anything here.' Absolutely scary. The first thing I remember - it's terribly hot there in the summer, it was in the over 30 degrees somehow - that there was a cat lying in the middle, really disgusting smell, stink, because they don't have refrigerators. So they killed chickens, they didn't cut off their heads, they sold them with beaks and claws. It was lying in a pile in the heat, creepy. I said I couldn't live there, I probably wouldn't eat. A month or two later, we found our way and unfortunately we kind of got used to it."
Jaroslav Dostál was born on 30 August 1966 in Prostějov. He grew up in the nearby village of Bedihošt‘. His mother was a teacher, his father came from a farming family and later worked in a unified agricultural cooperative (JZD). Because of his grandfather‘s background, his father and his siblings were not allowed to study. Jaroslav studied in 1981-1984 at the Jiří Wolker Grammar School in Prostějov, then SVVŠ. In his third year he applied to study abroad. He finished his fourth year of grammar school (1984-1985) at a specialised grammar school in Jevíčko, in preparation for going abroad. In 1985-1990 he studied International Economic Relations at Taras Shevchenko University in Kiev, Ukraine. He stayed there during Gorbachev‘s perestroika. During his stay he also visited other countries of the USSR. During his stay in Kiev in 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, about 130 km away, exploded. Yaroslav later had health problems and was hospitalized in a Kiev hospital. The circumstances of the accident were kept secret, the consequences downplayed. After graduating from university, he entered the field of international trade, where he still works, specializing in exports to the former Eastern Bloc countries. In 2023, at the time of the filming, he was living in Prostejov.
