"After WW II., there was famine in Russia and so my childhood was a hungry one. With bitter irony, everyone recalls Russia with its ambition to conquer central Europe, helping other states at that time. While in Russia, people were dying of hunger, Czechoslovakia received several hundred thousand tons of grain as 'brotherly aid'. My mum lost her milk and had nothing to eat. My dad was considering suicide but worked at a warehouse at that time where he was stealing carrots. This carrot saved their lives. From kindergarten, I recall potato mash with water instead of milk. But despite this impoverishment, one could always find a piece of bread with a cucumber and eating that, I felt eating like a king."
"After our wedding in February 1969, I immediately requested the authorities to let me visit my wife in Prague. I was entitled to the visit but needed a recommendation. As I wasn't engaged in any party structures, I could only rely on the university student organisation. However, they told me they couldn't give me a recommendation. According to them, I wasn't active enough as a student and hadn't fulfilled the so-called socialist commitments. Instead, my colleage Jurij Marušák was seen as very active, and so the organisation recommended that he visits my wife. I wasn't worthy of visiting my wife, and so I moved out for good."
"Me having the opportunity to work in Radio Free Europe was in essence an undeserved good fortune and it was very important to me. Thanks to that, I was able to return to journalism. I was completely content with being able to write in accordance with my convictions and get paid for that. That is an ideal and rare combination. Whether my writing was in line with the positions of the White House was secondary. That policy is flexible and I was able to go my way. I reckoned that the result, which would confirm my life-long striving, would be the fall of the communism, which I then lived to see."
Jefim Fištejn was born on 23 December 1946 in Kyiv, Ukraine. He grew up in an impoverished Jewish family in the Kyiv housing area Podil. After graduating from an evening school for young workers and undertaking an obligatory training in a factory, he studied journalism at the Lomosov university in Moscow. Thanks to a student exchange, he got to know his future wife Věr Němcová with whom he moved to Czechoslovakia in 1969. He shortly worked in the foreign department of Czechoslovak TV and then worked as a translator. In 1978, he signed Charter 77 and in 1980, under police pressure, he left the country. For a while, he lived in Vienna. In 1981, he was hired by the Radio Free Europe and moved to Munich. He did various jobs in the radio - among others as assistant to the program director or as a political broadcaster. In 1996, he moved with the whole office to Prague. In 1996-7, he worked as editor-in-chief of Lidové noviny. He authored numerous articles, essays and a film documentary Interrupted Spring. He is retired but still works as an adviser to the director of Radio Free Europe and publishes articles in various media.
