Pavel Černík

"He (ideological supervisor Mr Nový) had already gone on the trip with us. He had a notebook and wrote everything down. His notebook was filling up, even though it was all innocent stuff at the core. We boarded the plane and the girls opened a (Western) newspaper, because Zora Ulbertová spoke perfect English. And at that time, Chernobyl had just exploded. That was huge for girls who had small children at home. They heard over the phone from home that there was no danger. The newspapers said it was the other way around, so the girls were startled. And Mr Nový took out his notebook and started writing. Then we came back home and he started yelling, 'The Dragon Theatre is not going anywhere, anywhere, anywhere!' He was going to shut down the theatre. We had a planned trip to Scandinavia ahead of us. And Mr Nový said again, 'Cancel it immediately, nothing, ban it!' And a battle broke out when the world-famous Swedish puppeteer Michael Meschke and others came forward and started fighting for us. The ambassador to Finland at that time was Husák's son, Ján Husák. They all put up a fight, and in the end, we did go."

"The Germans arrived there (in Libenice near Kolín), and the war was already over. And somewhere in the woods, they found a parachute. So they drove the whole village to the village square and asked who - where - what, and otherwise they would shoot everyone. In the end, they didn't because the Russians were so close that they had to run away. But they would still have done it. That was how my father's family experienced the end of the war. My mother, who was in the hospital in Prague Podolí at the time, was scarred for life by the events of the end of the war. They were treating German soldiers from the front there. When the Red Army arrived, the Russians were understandably extremely angry with the Germans for having devastated their land. They chased freshly operated soldiers away with kicks, so the soldiers were dying in the corridors. The Germans."