František Kroutil

“The Yugoslavs organised this to support us – lot of people had been getting together, they were even coming to our camp and were quite friendly. They thought it couldn´t last for long and so did we. That we will return home one day. We were thinking still that we would just get to know the world a bit and after that, everything would be alright, as it was before we went to a holiday. Unfortunately, the time was passing and the situation in our country was deteriorating more and more. And as we established contact with uncle Kaucký, we also had this connection with Prague (Praha). We could even use his phone so we knew what was going on and our parent took care of us. My friend´s mother was this high-ranking secretary in the Red Cross, so she managed to get to Vienna and brought us each a suitcase with our clothes. As till then, we had just our clothing for this summer holiday at the sea, meaning we had almost nothing. No trousers, no sweater. And it was quite cold in October, so we were quite happy about that.”

“And as we didn´t find a place to stay – as there were nine of us or eleven maybe – they recommended to us that we go by train to any destination, that there were camps being opened to accommodate us. So we headed to the sea, to Mostar, but in Sarajevo – where we arrived maybe at four o´clock in the morning – we had to wait for the connecting train. So we set up tents to get some sleep. As you just couldn´t sleep on the train which was just crowded by people. And as we were getting something to eat, being the eldest in the group, people from TV and radio came to cover our story. And they told us that there was a camp being set up and asked us whether we wanted to go there. So they brought us there by car and in fact we were the first to get there.”