Jan Šinogl

“When we voted for the first time in this village which was narrow-minded and full of communists, they thought that we would not come to vote [in 1975] at all. We came, they gave us the ballot paper, which they placed inside the envelope for us straight away, and they thought that we would go to insert it in the ballot box directly, as it was commonly done, since people were not even going inside the voting booth. But we took the ballot papers and we went straight behind the voting booth. They were shocked that there was somebody who wanted to vote in the manner people were supposed to vote. And this was then dragging behind us. Actually, the year 1968 and my whole story culminated in this. Our mixed family and so on. We were confronted with many interesting things a number of times. For instance, one naïve aunt of ours from Vienna told us: ‘If you cannot arrive here, then at least come to the border gate and we will come there, too, and we will talk over the border fence.’ We had to explain to her, that we would not even be able to get to the border gate, because there was a five-kilometre zone where they would shoot us if we got in there, and that they would not let us get in there at all. On this example you can see the depravity of the system, that it’s completely idiotic.”

“Dad told me that there was a great number of people during the war who were informing Germans about other people, but after the war they turned into great partisans very quickly. Those informers suddenly became partisans and Red Guards. I saw this in 1968, too, when people suddenly changed so quickly. And I saw the absolutely same thing on myself very intensely after 1989. It was completely the same. From informers who had been informing upon us, when perhaps only three families from the village talked to us, and nobody else, and after 1989, and even more so after I became the mayor here, they all suddenly turned into great friends and they were saying how they had been thinking about us, and so on. And I am sure that this is a completely natural human phenomenon, when one needs to cover up one's conscience which blames him for something. It is a total turn-over and covering up of the black thoughts in one’s mind. I believe that this is a phenomenon which repeats itself in history over and over again.”