Miroslav Krobot

"My mother was from a Christian family, quite strong believers, they went to church. My dad was not a believer and he was not in the Communist Party. And in fact, sort of our upbringing was, I think, quite normal, it wasn't extreme one way or the other. We were, I think, kind of a gray area as a family, I guess. But my dad ran into the communist regime very hard one day. He worked as an electrical engineer in EZ Brno, which was a kind of socialist enterprise. And one day that company got an offer to build an electrical equipment factory in Afghanistan. Dad was about 50 years old and it was just the peak of his working career. He'd been in the GDR before, but Afghanistan... So he started reading all about it and got interested in it. And he ended up getting a report from the street organization of the Communist Party, like he wasn't a trustworthy person to go abroad. I never saw him that sad again. That's such a concrete example of how it was."

"Actually, we had a group of students at high school who wrote some short stories, and we also wrote plays, which I think we realized. They were Students and Cantors, as I recall. We had a music band and all that kind of cultural stuff got me interested. But it wasn't until sort of my second year of high school. And then actually, completely casually, because the entrance exams for art schools are before the entrance exams for other universities, so I sort of casually applied to JAMU in Brno, not counting on the fact that I could be taken seriously at all. And I got in. At the age of eighteen or nineteen. Which I think is very early for this field, you don't have that experience yet. But I've been there."