Milan Kašuba

“My father played the accordion and he announced to me that I would start taking violin lessons. Obviously, violin was something unknown to me, and so he signed me up for violin lessons. I was there one or two times, and then I stopped going there. And of course, always when I was leaving the house, dad would ask me where I was going. I would say: ‘For the violin lessons.’ I would grab the violin case, hide it under a bench and play football instead, that’s logical. About three weeks or one month later, a letter arrived home, and I didn’t know about it. And dad asked me again: ‘Where are you going?’ I replied: ‘For the violin lessons.’ I took my violin and I went to play football again. I was playing football for about ten minutes and then my father stormed out of the bushes with a long leather belt, he bent me over his knee and he gave me a threshing right there in front of the other boys. I had to take the violin and go for the lesson. And later – my poor father is no longer alive, but he has lived quite long, until ninety-one – I told him: ‘Dad, I thank you so much that you gave me that beating, because otherwise I certainly would not have gone here. And thanks to you, I had that opportunity.’”

“We thus arrived at the border between Austria and West Germany. We arrived there and they told us: ‘We cannot let you pass, you don’t have the exit permission.’ Ruda said that he would go and take care of it. The officer told him: ‘Well, go then, but somebody has to stay here as a guarantee.’ And so I stayed there. I lay down on the lawn right on the border, the weather was nice, it was in summer. I was lying in the grass comfortably, it was in June or around that time. Two hours later Ruda returned back from the Austrian border and he said: ‘Let’s go.’ We thanked them and we went back and then we drove for about one kilometre away from the border guard post. We arrived at an intersection and a Volkswagen van arrived there, and the driver told us: ‘Follow me.’ We drove for about a kilometre and a half away from the border crossing and there were fields. As we were driving there to a place where they were no longer able to see us, we got into his car and in the forest there we moved all our things in into that car. He had an axe and we cut some branches from a tree and we covered our car with them. We had moved our stuff from our car into his. And we drove on that road and he ordered us: ‘Get down.’ We all hid and it looked as if he was the only one in the car and he thus drove us into Austria.”