Milan Kunc

"My parents got the idea that we would go on a trip to Italy. My dad had a car, he had a Volkswagen, the Beetle, and we simply went on a trip to Italy. There was a lot of travelling in those days, and the Czechs were all over the world. Everybody was going to London, Paris, Italy, and America. It only took six months for people to go around the world, and we went to Italy with my parents for the whole summer. That was 1969, after the occupation, the whole world was alarmed back then, sympathetically alarmed with the situation in Czechoslovakia, which was quite popular then because of the Prague Spring. The strange thing was that wherever we arrived in the camp, the people there had an amazing solidarity, very human compassion for us and just tried to help us. I felt sympathy there for the terrible event that happened in Czechoslovakia. I was completely charmed by Italy. We were in Rome, in Bologna, near Naples. We swam in the sea, I was in the sea for the first time, so I liked it very much. I was sporty, so I was swimming in the sea even in the worst waves. I liked that a lot, the new sense of freedom. When we were coming back over the Alps, we were going to Nuremberg, there we learned from the media, we were coming back to Czechoslovakia, that people who were on the road and returning to the Republic - it was already October - whoever came back after the tenth of October would be declared an enemy of the Republic. That was a decree. The communists wanted to get rid of people who were not friendly or who were really enemies of the regime. Those who came back went to a kind of house arrest. There, I decided from one day to the next, when we were going back, I told my parents that I would not go to Czechoslovakia, that I would stay in the West. That was my firm decision. My mother cried, my father praised me very much, we just said goodbye, and they went back to the lion's den. I stayed in Nuremberg, got fifty marks, and that was it. I just jumped into completely unknown waters, and I was somewhere else."

"Those funerals were unforgettable. When Stalin died, there was a big funeral in the school. There were a lot of hardened Communist women there who cried and made such wonderful scenes of grief. That's what we experienced as children. All over the former Ost Bloc, both in Budapest and Warsaw, and Sofia in these satellite states, there were funerals of Stalin in the street with banners and brass bands. That was such a thing. That kind of ruckus, it was really a cinematic thing. It was rough, it was tragic. At school, we also started making drawings on the subject, and I became famous very quickly because I liked collage. That's a familiar story when I was a kid, how old was I? Well, I was eight years old. So I did this collage where I cut out this generalissimo in a white uniform with a military cap, and I did this sort of Mayan, celebratory bush in the background with flowering elderflowers and above that was a banner 'He died for peace', and that won first prize. It was spectacular that they liked the look of the poster, and I got special praise for the drawing, so it was on the notice board in the corridor afterwards. So when Stalin died for peace, it was strangely quiet for a while. Then it changed again. That was one funeral. A week later, there was the funeral of Gottwald, who was in Moscow for that very funeral; somehow, he didn't make it there. I think he was just blown away. Klement Gottwald then had a funeral. So there were two funerals in a row. That was that one winter period, the flies. One funeral after another. Those were the events - totalitarian flashes in the mind of a boy like me."