Jiří Mika

"It was very interesting at school in the eighth and ninth grades because we were learning a lot of things that were never spoken about before. For example, we had an excellent Czech teacher and she took us to the theatre a lot. I even remember seeing Karel Čapek's The Mother with that teacher, with Mrs. Scheinpflugová who was actually Karel Čapek's widow playing. We perceived a kind of thaw even at school, and that just ended with the arrival of the Soviet armies."

"It was a nice childhood because I lived in a little house right next to the forest, so I basically spent my early years in contact with the forest, with nature. We had a big garden with fruit trees, I had a dog, so I really lived in nature right from the very beginning when I was born. Before I went to school, to the first grade, my parents moved to Kyšice, which is a village not far from Kladno, about seven kilometers away. This is where I lived for a long time, in Kyšice. And again, although we lived by the road there, my best years or my best fun was that I used to run with my friends to the forest, because there was a forest, a field not far from where we lived. I had that contact with that nature all my youth actually. I'm saying that because I actually sought out that nature in my life as well, I went back there a lot, so you'll see that really the forest was important to me."