„And in the middle of it, suddenly the Suez crisis began. Damn I don´t remember now when it was, sometime in October I guess. Those French and English went to Alexandria on ships and we went to Cairo. And we stayed in a hotel for a few nights and those ambassadors said we´d leave Cairo and those arsholes wanted to evacuate people to Libya and the train rails ended in Alamein. Then they negotiated some kind of a lift. That happened at night. Good lord, what a mess there was at the station!“
„And I was going through the sifting five-year plan, just what he does and where he goes, who does he meet and what he says. And I was telling myself damn, as I still stayed in a hotel. Over there in the Axa hotel in Poříčí across from Bílá labuť. Damn, why do I still live in a hotel, it costs an arm and leg. And then I figured out that those swines did not want to go to a hostel, where they´d be easy to spot. They just came to the hotel, took my room key and spied inside on what´s in my suitcase and whether I am writing anything or else. And I always marked the position of the suitcase with my pen, yeah in the corners, and each month… Well I looked every single day and once a month there was a check and the suitcase was moved a little.“
„One or two days before Americans invaded Wels, some general der Luftwaffe and I we took some drawings from the archive into the furnace for burning… All of them, well I have not seen how empty it got, but there was a lot of them anyway, so probably the important ones such as the wings and fuselage. Those details could remain in there. We took everything they gave us away.“
Vlastimil Maňoušek was born in 1924 in Bučovice. In August 1943 he was totally deployed in a factory in an Austrian town of Wels. There he survived an American air raid bombing at the end of war. After the liberation of our country he returned to Prague. In 1951 he joined the army and worked in the Military Technical Institute in Prague. In 1956 he left to Alexandria as a translator for Egyptian tankist courses. At the same time the so called Suez crisis broke out in Egypt and the British and French armies were coming to the area. Together with his colleagues he fled to Libya and Nile as far as to Vádi-Halfa and then further to Belgium by airplane. At the end of the 1950th Vlastimil began to work for the generality in Prague, but still refused to join the party, although we was intensely manipulated by the defence intelligence to do so. Five years later he came back to Brno again, where he worked first as a translator and then in the unions. He taught himself English and Chinese. He is interested in acupuncture, he has been using to heal himself for many years now. Today he is married with a son, a doctor of medicine.
