Nina Ingrišová

“The gym was nice, it was a former Arab mosque and just across the street there was, on the corner, a restaurant called Heart of Europe Restaurant, because Czechoslovakia is the heart of Europe. He used to have a restaurant already in Prague. Not just a pub, a restaurant. His name was Karel Fink and had to change his name to Finek, since Fink is a pejorative word in America. He called himself Finek and still had Fink in his documents. It was a tiny restaurants, twenty tables packed in, a piano, harmonium, he played harmonica and sang. It was so popular! The restaurant was frequented by film actors, TV actors, it was almost a meeting place of the old Hollywood, it was always crowded and he had Yugoslav wine, traminer, this I remember. And he was very skilled. Like it used to be in cafés, he always wore a tuxedo, he could present himself. No wonder people went there. And the meal was great. Fink cooks like your mother did, this was his motto in Czech. And indeed, it was Mrs Fink who did the cooking with her mother. They hired a Mexican guy to wash the dishes. It was small and comfy. Karel Fink always used to say this joke. Whenever exiles arrived who had nothing and boasted that they had factories and everything, while they being still very young… and the Finks had a little dog, a bitch called Lassie. And he used to say: “Back in Prague, our Lass used to be a Saint Bernard dog.’ I will never forget that. It was so apt for many people.”

“Then three trains met in this deep valley. Two headed in one direction, the other one in the opposite one. I don’t remember clearly, but our train was in the middle. And there was a house on the hill, a field and a lot of soldiers. There came a plane, shot at us and the two engines were on fire. We ran into the field, behind the house, there was a fence from the back, and in front, we found later, there were soldiers of the Vlasov army. They were going to liberate Prague. They were these idiots who were going to liberate Prague. And they used to say, ‘You are from Czechoslovakia? We are going to liberate Prague.’ Our men told them, ‘You fools, they will hang you. Do you think they welcome you with open arms when you have German uniforms?’ We tried to persuade them and they tried to persuade us to go back, that they would liberate Prague. And they made fires and scolded us that it was because of our train that the Americans air raided their trains. They could not hit our engine, as it was in the middle.”

“[Inozemcev] told us, ‘Try to get into the American zone.’ They already knew that it was divided into French, English and American zones. And so into Bavaria, in the Bavarian direction. We rode in the direction of Munich. Of course the journey was quite horrible. They joined our car to military trains, they always disconnected us at one railway station or another, until another train arrived and we could move on. We ran like rabbits… during the journey, before we got behind Munich in Germany, they shot out three engines. Always there was a volley of shots and the steam was gone. And we ran across the field… once at night we ran from the train near a village of Mühldorf. We were exhausted and nervous, we alway had to run for shelter whenever…”

“The parents of my mother did not want to say farewell to him and he always used to say that they didn’t properly say farewell. They reproached him for taking us to Germany, to uncertainty. ‘Leave them here, Victor, we’ll hide them here! Nothing will happen to them.’ My dad said, ‘I don’t force them! They can stay here, I don’t make them go.’ But I said before all of them, my relatives, ‘If my mum stays, I’ll go with my dad alone. I will not be waiting for the Soviets here.’ I knew from the cossacks and people who had fled the Soviet Union, what atrocities they did. Well, they showed you here, the Malinovsky Army, and you still have the Malinovsky Square in Brno, this makes me so mad’ He has a statue there, the communists lay flowers at it and sing The International. Now, twenty years after the Velvet Revolution. It is horrible.”