Jiří Henych

“I don’t know if it was a former concentration camp, but it was the sort of building like they had in concentration camps, it was probably a remnant from the war. That was the American zone, and it housed fugitives from the East, not only from the Czech Republic, but from the whole eastern Socialist camp. And they wanted to check what sort of persons we were, which I can understand. They didn’t lock us in, you could go out; you had to tidy up, a bit like at military service. And you waited there until the commission acknowledged whether your reasons were sufficient to justify them granting you political asylum, or not.”

“With great difficulty, that’s a well-known fact about the Swiss - that they’re of themselves very reserved people. With great difficulty, when I compare with the current situation, how my Swiss wife is being accepted here and how they approached me back then in Switzerland, it’s completely different. But I have to say that I was helped by the fact that I had married a Swiss. But even her family, that was very, very difficult to start with, because in their eyes I was some sort of troglodyte from the Carpathians.”

“I left for a three-day trip to Vienna, that was a bus with about forty people and we all had just one joint passport. The passport was valid for forty tourists. So I didn’t have any document at all. And I was the only young man, the rest were around forty to fifty years old, I was the only young person. So I was regarded as a potential runaway. So when we came to Vienna, I was informed by one person from the bus that this man, and he was pointed out to me, was someone I should watch out for. That he might be a secret [agent], that I should be careful. We came to Vienna, you can’t take pretty much anything with you on a three-day trip, just two bags, you can’t take two suitcases for three days. And I made use of the first opportunity and, quite simply, legged it.”

“I worked a few months in Skloexport [a glass distribution company - transl.]. Skloexport was in Liberec at the time, because of the glass that was produced in North Bohemia. I worked there and I signed up for a number of different trips, but I was always refused. So I started playing with the idea of moving to Yugoslavia, because I heard that it was possible to get from there to Italy. But it seemed a bit dangerous to me, I was afraid. If things went wrong, I’d end up in jail. So I searched for a safer route to legally cross over into the West. And the only chance I had was working in the factory, they’d never let me out on an official trip at Skloexport. I tried to get on a boat that sailed around Scandinavia all the way to what used to be Leningrad, but I had no chance at all. Then they approved me for this three-day trip, which was a miracle.”