Miroslav Lapiš

“My friend kept teasing me: ´Come on, we'll go there.´ I did not think so much and I said: ´And how do we escape? Well it seems... it is not possible, man cannot get there without a foreign exchange form.´ That was it. ´Well, yeah, we're going to Yugoslavia with some travel agents.´ It was possible that way. I refused him. He went with that travel agents and never came back. He stayed in Austria, where he established a locksmith, he made fences, gates and all. He's the boss, he's got a couple of people employed there. The worst thing was that when he was escaped, the secret police came in three weeks and began to interrogate everyone. One by one, there were about five of us, just young boys, including old men, those old people who worked there, maybe sixty-year-olds; they also had to go to the interrogation. They led us up one by one and squeezed us like a lemon, each and every one. So I did not confess anything, did not say we joked around the topic.”

“I love the airplanes very much, and back then we came from Liptovský Mikuláš, at the time we were still together with the Slovaks, there came a politruk and offered us at a military air school and I was very excited because I said, ´Then I will go.´And then MiG-15 started again, those were the first jet planes from Russia. And I just signed in, got this application to fill out at home, my father should have signed it, and within a week they would have come back to recruit us. So I signed up, a colleague also signed up, who lived about a hundred and fifty yards from me, and I showed it to my dad and he said, ´Oh, no, I will not let you go up there, you go down the mine, we get coal, we'll have the heat and up there it's really dangerous!´ Well, it was dangerous down there, of course.”