Miroslav Svoboda

""We all tried to get the blue [booklet]. Most of my friends did it by pretending to be 'mentally ill,' as that was the easiest to fake. And I don’t know why, maybe out of some masochistic reason, I decided that since everyone was doing it that way, I would come up with something different. I'm just not gonna do what everybody else is doing. And my friend and I came up with duodenal ulcer disease, which is a disease that's there for a while and not there for a while. Just because you can't see something right there on the x-ray doesn't mean you don't have it. It's there in the spring and it's not there in the fall. It's kind of intermittent. And this character just seemed like a good one for that purpose. When I told them, I knew I was going to go in for an x-ray the next day. So my friend Stephen and I figured I should eat a lentil. We figured out how long before the x-ray that it would be in that duodenum and not somewhere else. About four hours before or something. So I got up that night four or five hours before - I was still living at my parents' house at the time - and I went into the kitchen and said I'm going to take one lentil, wash it down with water and go back to sleep. Well, I didn't find the lentil, it just wasn't there in the pantry. So I thought, 'What now?' Now my world was almost falling apart. I thought, 'The whole structure's falling down because there's no lentils...' So then I found some beans. But the beans were bigger than the lentils. I thought, I guess it's better this way than nothing. So I swallowed the bean, washed it down and went to sleep. Then the next day I was there describing the symptoms I had studied."

"For example, I remember that somewhere in that elementary school a pioneer organization was being formed, so we were introduced to some two young people, husbands, that they would be our leaders. These two young people took us to their apartment in a block of flats near the school. And I don't know how old I might have been, some second or third grade... I don't remember how old I was when I joined Pioneer. But I remember that they just took us into the living room and they really had busts of Lenin and pictures like that on the living room wall, which was not common anymore. I already knew that at that time. It wasn't usual to have such decorations and such artifacts in the living room. I know that because of this I acquired such an aversion to it that I even resisted the very mild, I must say, pressure from my parents not to go out and sort of go there. So I was like, 'No, I'm just not going to come here because these people are really weird.'"