Pavel Havlíček

"At that time I came to Pavel, he lived in Brooklyn, in a part called Williamsburg. Today it is an exclusive place, but at that time it was the border of Polish, Hasidic and Hispanic cities. Paul lived in the Hispanic part. When I arrived to his house, I was terrified because half the street was burned, shattered, there were three bullets in the main door of the house. When you came out on the street in Williamsburg, you were scared. For the first two or three days, I sat in my room, staring at a dry tree. The windows of the room went into the skylight, so there was not much light. I was thinking about what I did and that I would return to Europe after about a month. I was making a plan to survive with the $ 700 I had for that month. Then, after those two days, Paul told me he was going to Manhattan and asked me to go with him. We walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. And as we approached Manhattan, I felt the incredible energy and I had tears in my eyes. As we were getting closer and closer to Manhattan, the more tears flowed from my eyes, because I had never experienced something so monumental. The city was definitely pulsating with energy I had never experienced. I realized I had to discover this. That knowledge lasted thirty years."

"I was starting illustrating back then. I worked for the New York Times, the New Yorker and many other magazines, and I made a living from it. But I wanted more. Petr Sís told me that my pictures were quite nice, and he gave me a contact of the publishing house he worked with. I came there, they liked the pictures, and the editor-in-chief told me to write a short story and draw it, so they could see that I could draw a story. So, I did that, and I called a month later. We met again and the lady told me that she liked it very much and that they would think about publishing it. And the book was published. The book is called George. At the time, I used the name Paul Borovsky. I still had a career in free art, painting, planned. I was afraid that this commercial work might boycott my artistic career. Today I know it's nonsense, but at that time I thought it would."

"At that time, the only places my parents and I visited were the Eastern Bloc countries. We often went to East Germany, we were in Romania, Hungary. The crossing began with those borders where there were barbed wires, loopholes, and soldiers with German shepherds. When you crossed the border, it was suddenly calm. Suddenly one felt that he was somewhere in some clean environment in which one is supposed to live.”

"In 1968 we were in our summer house in Řevnice near Prague and my father came unexpectedly and said that we have to come to Prague immediately, that they were closing Prague, that it was being surrounded by the army and that we had the opportunity to get there as the last of the cars. That also happened. Then I remember the occupation. We lived in Žitná Street in Prague 1 and my grandmother in Bělehradská in Vinohrady. My grandmother went to pick me up because my mother went to work, and we went up the Žitná Street, where the main highway is today. We turned around a corner and a Russian tank came out from one side and started shooting at us. The door from one corner house opened and a lady let us in. At that time, people were incredibly kind to each other and helped each other. She let us in, and I remember the bullets flying overhead. The Russian soldier shot at me, at the little boy, and at my grandmother, who was already an old lady and was walking with a stick."

"I emigrated with my friend Ivana Šulcová, who was studying at DAMU (Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague) at the time. We went together with a bus tour to Yugoslavia, Istria. When we got there, the tour leader told us that we would all have to hand in our passports, because then a lot of people were emigrating this way, and that they would issue us a document with which we could move around Yugoslavia. We refused to give those passports. No one spoke to us since that during the trip. It was clear to them that we were probably emigrating."