Ing. Pavel Hořák

"My mother also went through the period when there was a typhus epidemic in Terezín, where all the death marches returned or took place, where the Germans drove everyone from the east from Poland to the West and they came all miserable to Terezín and brought with them typhus too. The mother cared for them, she was intended to treat these people, but when Terezín was liberated and the Red Army came there, quarantine was announced, but the mother and one of her friends got together and fled. As they were leaving Terezín, a Czech policeman was standing there, supposedly to tell them, 'Miss, I must not let you go.' And then he said, 'But you know what, I have to look that way right now.' So he let them pass. So they gradually arrived in Prague and their parents met there. So I would say mathematically nine months after that meeting, my older brother was born."

"Every day early in the morning around four o´clock, there was a so-called briefing, when the organizers went again through the route of the stage of the day, and pointed out all possible tricks, traps that are there, and changes compared to the itinerary. Because in Africa, when the wind was blowing, where there was a big dune, it was somewhere else the next week, so some roads didn't go very well. When we were there for the first time, of course it was in the open air, so it wasn't very easy to understand and hear, so we always only gathered half of what they told us. So then I had the idea that functioned terribly well, then everyone used it. Fortunately, I don't know how we figured it out, I had a small dictaphone with me, so I always went to the oven or the amplifier, I put the dictaphone there and recorded everything they said about the day. I didn't wake the navigators at all in the morning to be there with me, and then we locked ourselves in the cabin and I played it and dictated to them the details they wrote down in the itinerary so they knew. And of course, when I didn't understand, the dictaphone allowed me to re-play it, maybe two or three times, to could really understand."