Lubomír Kubík

„In 1974, I was on holiday in Yugoslavia and I got some British pounds from my brotehr. He worked in football and there had been some Englishmen visiting so he exchanged them. I told him I needed something for the trip to Yugoslavia. I didn’t want to live off those few pennies I had – one couldn’t live off that minuscule amount decently. [Note: people travelling abroad were able to exchange legally only small amount of foreign currency in state-owned banks.] So he gave me some British pounds and I exchanged them there. And someone from our group must have seen me at an exchange office. Then they snitched on me and a few months later, I was summoned to the police, regarding some passport and so on. I had it at that time [the passport]. And it appeared that there had indeed been a report and I was to explain where I had gotten the money. There were a plenty of people I had vaguely known before from Jihlava for example. And I said: ‘Obviously, I was there,’ and I defended myself. That I couldn’t have been there penniless. How does it look when one can’t buy a beer or ice cream. And he [the officer] started admonishing me. Nothing came of that. They confiscated my passport and that was it.”

„And one more question regarding the year 1968 and the August occupation. You were in Jihlava at that time?” “In 1968, I was not in Jihlava. In 1968, there waas finally a chance to travel. I had a friend who wandered around France and Norway and so on. And I asked: ‘How do you do that?’ He gave me an address of some youth organisation, that there could be some work to do for me. That one could stay there for a month or longer. I went to the so-called West Germany. I was there in a camp near Kassel – that’s a well-known town, Volkswagen, locomotive production. They were building the so-called SOS village – later, those would be built here [in Czechoslovakia]. It was for Vietnamese orphans from the war that was going on there at that time. The Germans took them in and needed to place them somewhere. Either foster care or some sort of a camp, they were building little cottages where they could stay all year long. Those were kit houses, we built concrete foundations and then assembled the parts, covered it with boards and that was it, people could move in. That’s where I worked and that’s where I was on the 21th of August. I still remember it vividly how a Slovak girl came to wake me up, it was still dark, about 4 am. She told me: 'Luboško, get up, Russians are in our country!’ I couldn’t really grasp it, I said that it’s not possible. I started looking for a radio, there was no TV there. We listened what was going on, I had goosebumps. There were hectic commentaries about what was going in Prague. There were tanks, there was fire, one could hear it in the background. And I thought: ‘Oh my goodness, what a fine mess. What do I do now?‘ One thinks about family and how they are doing. I decided to stay and returned on the 5th of September. Here, the main wave was already over.

„You also mentioned that you knew Jan Trefulka, the writer.“ „Jan Trefulka, yes, I have been to his place. I went to see him there. At that time, I didn’t live in Brno yet, I commuted from Jihlava to see my wife. It was, I think, in 1982. I had a manuscript and I wanted to know his opinion. It was not political at all. It was just a social novel and I wanted his judgment as he was an established writer. But Kříž had told me: ‚I have seen him once…‘ That Kříž guy was fired from a cultural centre and he worked as a train conductor, that’s where he was able to get a job. He just arrived to Brno and decided to call. So he went there, they had a chat, then he went his way and when he was at work, even before the train left for Jihlava, the cops came and started asking what had he been doing there, why he had come. And then he told me: ‘If you go to see him, be careful, he’s probably under surveillance. He had a house there, it was a semi-detached house. He lived on Barvičova street. The other part of the house, that’s where Milan Uhde, his brother-in-law lived. So I rang the bell downstairs and he invited me in and looked around to check whether someone is watching before he closed the door. He looked at me doubtfully. And I said: ‘I am acquaintances with Mr. Kříž and I don’t want anything else from you beyond looking at this manuscript and telling me what’s political about that,’ and so on. I took out the manuscript and left it there. He took it and said that he would read it. And then he looked around again before he closed the door. And I thought: ‘This is going to be unpleasant if someone sees me.’ But nobody knew me here, I was not like Kříž. They knew him, they knew what he was up to. But nothing happened, or I didn’t notice. It probably just escaped them.”