Jan Johannes Novotný

"So my girlfriend and I decided to screw it up and leave for good. That's how we did it. Look, back then, leaving the republic wasn't so difficult because everything was such a mess. So we had a passport, just getting the passport took two days. We left via Austria. Mom had a classmate there, so we lived with her for a while. Well, then we negotiated Australia, they invited us to Australia. And when we signed at the Australian embassy, we signed a document where we simply committed to staying for three years in Australia, so we had a free ticket. Which was great.”

“I used to have nothing against the Russians, as well, but we learned about them, we learned Russian, right, or Russian was compulsory. In the end, I enjoyed the Russian. Well, yes, but then I saw the Russian soldiers, so I wanted to speak Russian with some of them. But they were some other soldiers, they were more from Asia, because none of them spoke Russian, not one, no one at all. And I notice how terribly dirty they were, as if they had not seen water for many months. So I thought to myself: 'For god´s sake, what kind of army is this?' And then the decision was simply made that that was not possible. For I suspected that the dark times were coming.”