Jaroslav Novotný

“A bulletin came saying they were looking for volunteers to the Technische Nothilfe, for assignment to bombed-up cities. The volunteer is to freed from his studies, and this contract would enable him to pass exams once a year. So I, the unfulfilled rebel, let myself get drafted. And that started a whole new world for me. I could already speak German, but it wasn’t easy. We lived in a small settlement called Steele, now it’s on the outskirts of Essen. In the morning we would set out to wherever they needed us. It was demolishing work more than rescuing. It was better to knock the ruins down so they wouldn’t collapse on someone. They collapsed on me once. They dug me out of the rubble, put me on a stretcher, took me to hospital; I recovered there still wrapped up in a lady’s winter coat that some German woman had draped over me. I witnessed the liberation by the English army in hospital – it was there region. I call it ‘crossroads’ – when you’re down in the dumps, you suddenly find purpose again. You don’t know where to go next, and suddenly a solution presents itself. There was an English unit there, which was devoted to de-Nazification, so interrogating Germans, and I interpreted for them. I learnt proper English as well. What luck! I wasn’t in a rush to get home because I was living it out in full, after the war I wore a battledress. What more could I want! It took me a year to get home. I sauntered through Germany, interpreting – for Poles, a bit for Russians, certainly for Slovaks, Czechs, Moravians. The Ruhr Valley was full of ‘Gastarbeiters’, people who had been assigned to labour there, who needed to get home somehow. So we did that.”

“So you dream of some kind of nonsense, that Grandma Cibulková has come to visit in Europe, and when she’s about to take her flight home, I’m supposed to look after her. It’s in Vienna, and the queue for the aeroplane leads all the way up to the middle of Mariahilfer Straße, the main thoroughfare in the centre of Vienna. The line drags terribly, so to while away the time you start chatting with people, only to realise that you’ve passed through the checkpoint, that you’re boarding the aeroplane with Grandma, that they’ve seated you and you’re off. Everything goes quite smoothly at Ruzyně Airport, when suddenly the door opens and a enormously fat cop in a fur coat comes in, keeps coming closer and closer, saying: ‘Papers, please.’ Everyone gives him their papers, but I have none. He turns to me and says: ‘And what have we here!’ Rough stuff. A second dream of the sort is also a great favourite. You’re sitting in a tram, and you don’t know how much the fare is, where to buy a ticket, what the ticket looks like, and where you actually want to go. You don’t know anything. The same can also be situated in the underground, which is a complete horror. The emigrant keeps on, and that enormous cop appears again and says: ‘What have we here.’ There are people who couldn’t shake off those dreams, and even after the regime collapsed, they still had them.”