Jaroslav Róna

“I was eighteen and I went to see Zanussi’s film at Star Cinema, the film was called The Illumination. He’s a Polish director, brilliant. The protagonist, a young man, didn’t know what to do with his life, what to do in Socialist Poland, he was completely forlorn. I sat there and told myself: What about you, you’re the same as he is, and you don’t know what, either. And suddenly it was really as if some angel had descended upon me, and I heard a voice in my head: You’ll be a painter. Like some kind of light, as if someone had spoken to me from somewhere. Completely and totally unbelievable. It filled me with the unbreakable conviction that I would be a painter. I said to myself: Oh, so I’ll be a painter. I went home, woke my parents up, told them that I had a vision in the cinema and that I would be a painter. Dad said that if I was accepted to the school, he’d help me with everything. From that moment I began preparing for the exams, I began drawing, and since then I’ve been churning along like a motorised mouse, so I haven’t had a moment’s time.”

“When the Russians came here, I was eleven years old at the time, my family voted whether we’d emigrate or not, so it was decided we’d emigrate. Because we didn’t know what the Russians would do, and Dad thought that they might start loading us on trains to the gulags again. He was phobic about it. So in the summer of sixty-nine we travelled to Geneva, where we stayed in the house of one of Dad’s friends, a furrier, who was very well-off - that’s why they had me train as a furrier afterwards. We were there in emigration for about a month, and then Mum said it couldn’t go on like that, and so she forced us all to get up and back into the car and go back into Communism. At night, sometime in early September we crossed the border at Rozvadov, the only car to come back, and the other lane was jammed up with an endless line of emigrants with fully loaded cars. I looked out of the window, it was raining, the road was covered in puddles, a hole, and the yellowed reflections of lamps at the crossing. Soldiers were standing around, and we slowly drove back into Bohemia, and everyone in that line of cars were tapping their foreheads, so we came back greeted by an endless guard of honour, all tapping their foreheads.”