Karel Jiřík

"Nobody burned me with cigarettes. But there was psychological pressure, where they thought I would have a breakdown. One time they came up with the fact that I had smuggled three hundred tons of glass. The second time they came back with... I can't remember exactly. That's a long time too." - "And did they tell you exactly what they wanted from you?" - "To write something. They weren't specific. They said if I didn't file a report. It culminated in me telling them I couldn't write very well. So they said I'd just take pictures. I'll say something else about that. It's recently when I met the people who were on the boat with me. They all worked together. I asked them why they didn't have problems like I did. - And all these people have a pension of about sixty-seventy thousand crowns today. Let me explain it simply. Fifteen thousand from the Czech Republic. And because after the year ninety they were driving for three countries. Holland. Luxembourg. Germany. That's how they collected it. So they got two and a half thousand euros a month of additional pension from these countries."

"I went to report to the police. I went to the police station at seven o'clock in the evening and said I wanted to stay there. But they told me they couldn't help me right away. That I had to stay until the morning when they would call the officials to discuss it with me. In the evening there was no officer there. They put me in a cell. They gave me Coca-Cola, left the cell open because they had no place to let me sleep. In the morning they took a small boat to my boat to get my personal belongings. I didn't have my passport or my swimming pass, but I had my papers. I had everything ready. But I was afraid to get on the boat. The German policemen told me not to be afraid, that I should take everything I needed, that they would let me off the boat again. And I must say that the captain behaved very well. He was a big communist, but he was very polite to me. He even wished me well."