doc. PhDr. MUDr. CSc. Kamil Kalina

"In Čáslav I was the so-called chief doctor of the battalion. And at the same time the only doctor. But I really learned a lot. That was really perhaps the best medical internship, I learned a lot of normal, everyday medicine - from viruses to various fungal diseases, skin issues. I also was in charge of psychological counseling there, which was very important. And there was a hospital just across the street, and I went there for consultations. And then when I was commissioned a second lieutenant, I didn't have to be in the barracks at all. I was living in the hospital and going to the barracks to work in the infirmary, so quite a freedom."

"The year 68 and the Prague spring brought an unprecedented opportunity to go abroad for holiday practice. I had taken English at grammar school, and added English conversation, so I ventured - just for the language facilities - to Britain. I think I got the addresses of several hospitals, some in England and some in Scotland, from the faculty and got a favorable response that I could come there. There I was living in a dormitory with similar trainees and one morning I was woken up by banging on the door: 'Russia attacks your country'. I watched TV, the images that my peers were experiencing in reality. It was moving. My mother send me a message not to come back. I stayed in that hospital even a little longer than the experience amounted to, and was offered a scholarship to medical school in a smaller Scottish university town, Aberdeen, for the next year. I thought about it, but then I started to go to London, and I was a liaison between the student group of Czechoslovaks in London and Scotland, and then there was this mood in London that we were going to go to help our homeland. So we were heroes, and when we left sometime in the autumn, I think it was November [1968], on the train from London, from Euston Square, the London girls would send us kisses and throw roses into the carriages, it was amazing. And then I came to Prague and immediately got a beaten by a baton during a student demonstration."

“In the 1980s I worked in the psychiatric ward in the present-day General University Hospital and every boiler-room that was there was associated with the name of some important person. There was Petr Pithart who was in charge of one boiler-room, and Petr Fidelius, a linguist, worked in another boiler-room, and outside there was the cardinal Miroslav Vlk, who was cleaning the window panes and Alfred Kocáb, the father of Michael Kocáb, also worked in one of the boiler rooms. So it was quite lively there.”

“So called “kecandas,” chat-sessions, consisted of various literary and philosophic seminars held at private homes, and it was nicknamed a household university. We were often meeting in the house that once belonged to the Čapek brothers in the Vinohrady neighbourhood where the painter Brázda with his wife lived. We were meeting in their place often. Literary seminars were frequently held in the boiler-rooms of the General University Hospital as well. So the atmosphere there was quite inspiring.”

“One day we went with my colleagues from the psychiatric hospital in Horní Beřkovice where I worked at that time to visit Sváta Karásek at the castle Houska where he worked as a castellan at that time. When we arrived there we noticed that policemen were there. They came for Sváťa and then they sentenced him and he was in prison for three or four years. We tried to ride away because they obviously noticed quickly that somebody was there. We were driving fast through pine forests and eventually we shook them off. Then we realized that they perhaps would be waiting for us in front of the psychiatric hospital, and so we left the car in the cemetery and we got back to the hospital through a hole in the fence. Well, and so we won, and they did not catch us.”