František Horký

„I used to commute to Kolín to the trade school and later when I had finished my apprenticeship. I took the 5 am train. Just after I entered the car, there was such a group, they were going from someplace near Poříčany and every day, they played cards. I entered through the back door, they always lifted their heads from the game and commented me. That was the first one, that’s how the morning started. Then I came to work, to the locker room, immediately, someone informed me about my looks. In the afternoon, the same thing. I got on the train, I went home and again, someone told me how I looked. I never understood when I was told: ‘You know, the common folk have so many things to worry about…’ It seemed to me that they had only one thing to worry about – my looks.”

“He was in jail because due to a course of unlucky coincidences, when after visits in the psychiatric hospital in Bohnice, so that he wouldn’t get conscripted, his mom went to see the head of the psych ward and told him to send him to the army. That’s how mothers like their children and then, it was hard to bear that they [the children] are in the psych ward. At that time, whoever had been to the psych ward was a lunatic. Nowadays, nobody thinks much about it – so, she was in Bohnice, so she spent two months there, she has some meds, every second or third person went through something like that. But then, it was different. So she [the mother] begged them to send him to the army. And the administration totally fucked it up or else it wouldn’t be possible because they sent only the most reliable of the reliable ones to the border, so he materialised at the Western border. Exactly in the Šumava Mountains, not somewhere at the Polish border, but in Šumava. To guard the border from an observation tower. The worst border there could be, and by some twist of fate, he got there. There was some crazy red tape, or, I dunno, maybe someone wanted to make a stupid joke. So they sent him to the border and he ganged up with some guy and drew him a map, how to get out of the country. And then they somehow caught him [that man] and they found out. Jaroslav spent eight months in custody. At the end, it ended up well, he only got a year in jail. But for those eight months, they threatened him that he’d be tried for espionage and that would be ten years, right. So he spent eight months counting: will that be six years? Or seven? Or eight?”