Miroslav Ihnačák

“I was sixteen and I started to play for men’s team in Poprad. Gradually I went through all the youth representational selections and since we used to attend various retreats also in the West, we were asked to fill in different questionnaires. On the other page there was a column to fill: ‘Which of your relatives lives abroad?’ My eldest sister emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1966 and my brother with another sister in 1968. My mother’s sister left already in 1948, so we had way too many relatives in America. However, there were only two lines in this column and if I wrote only two names, the State Security members knew all, and they’d question me why I had not stated other names as well. They found out everything very quickly. That’s when I started to notice, I wasn’t allowed to travel to the West.”

“In December 1985 I got on a train in Košice and got off here, in Bratislava, since there were already people waiting for me. I was leaving on December 26, it was on the St. Stephen’s Day, yet before I went to say goodbye to my friends on a party, and on December 27, I got off the train in Bratislava. I was wandering the downtown streets as we were supposed to meet at five in the hotel Carlton. However, I suspiciously thought about everyone looking at me back then, that he/she was spying on me. The whole runaway was perfectly organized, though. A diplomatic car came to pick me up, I got in and they drove me through the borders all the way to Vienna. They only warned me about three upcoming controls, that we would stop three times, during which I was supposed to be completely quiet in the car’s trunk. So, since I was prohibited to travel to the West, I had never seen or crossed the border before. They only told me, there will be military, police and customs control, but I don’t exactly remember the order in which they checked us. When I got out of the car in Hainburg, for me it was like going from a night to a day. Even though it was night and dark, everything was lighted up there and back home everything seemed so dark. For example, back home, since five o’clock, it was dark everywhere, no lights shining, no adverts displaying like today. Nothing. But when I got over the border, everything was lighted up … so that was how I managed to cross the border.”