Milan Vlček

"These people looked ragged, stupid. What was interesting was that it happened to me a few times that the Russians, when we were talking to them, the women, the waitresses, of course at first glance we differed in face and clothes, but what shocked me the most was when the Russian said to me, 'Well look, you're completely different' and I said, 'Like what?' And she was like, 'When you walk like that, like upright, you look so confident, you're completely different.' And they were just saying about themselves, 'We're not living, we're surviving.' Their first concern was to get food, acceptable, not that there was visible hunger, no, but you couldn't buy, like, meat. Something like our meat shops, there was no shop like that. Meat was in a corner somewhere, they brought a cow in there, which of course didn't have the nice meat anymore, sirloin and this wasn't there, and there were two guys, they had this log, a big axe, the women lined up, he took the axe and chopped what he cut, the one who was next got it in a net bag, he weighed it for her, the next one. Whoever didn't like it, leave, you don't get anything..."

"In that Tatra factory, everything was assembled. There were halls built by Ringhoffer in 1830 or so, still in their original condition. In that awful place, where they used to make horse-drawn trams, people crawled on their knees and assembled the trams under terrible conditions. And we were all the way at the back, in a hall with space for just two trams. When they finished building a tram, they pushed it over to us, and we checked whether it was made properly, assembled correctly, especially the electrical parts. However, the absurdity of the Communist system was that at one time they were producing up to a thousand trams a year, the largest manufacturers of one type of tram in the world. Nobody else in the world was making it. Ninety percent or how many went to Russia. The crazy thing was they didn't have a test track to test the finished tram. So they assembled it, or we assembled it, and they tested to see if the features did what they were supposed to do, but not while they were running. So the tram, for example, travelled for six months, 4,000 kilometres to Siberia, and there for the first time it was put on the rails and we tested whether it would run. But the fact is, it was so well made that there were usually no problems with it."