Jiří Oplatek

“Back then I managed to secure asylum in Switzerland. For those of us who came here in the late sixties, early seventies, there was no problem in getting political asylum 99 percent of the time. Ten years later it already started to be a problem, and many people weren’t approved, not even when they were from Communist countries. I managed to arrange for him to get asylum at the office in Bern, even though he wasn’t in Switzerland. [...] Reuniting family, that still means something in Switzerland, it’s a big bonus. They had the great idea of sending it to the embassy in Prague, which wrote to him and sent him a letter by Czech post to his letterbox in Brno to inform him he had been given asylum in Switzerland. These are two worlds, each in their own sphere, it’s not easy to understand. If they don’t try, they don’t understand. So he couldn’t go to get his visa from the Swiss embassy when he went to Yugoslavia. The way we did it, they sent it to the consulate in Zagreb.”

“I managed to get a paper from his saying I’m not the bearer of military secrets, I didn’t how it was with the borders. I requested a passport while still doing military service, and I received it the next day after coming back from the army. It was in early September 1969, the borders closed down in October. I managed to get out to Basel about a month before that, on 4 September 1969. There was no problem getting a place here in the late sixties, there was a huge boom here. Employment was practically unknown, at least in Switzerland. My wife got a job as a graphic designer at one advertising agency. [...] I set off into the streets, [when] I saw an architect’s doorplate, [I said] I was an architect from Brno, that I was looking for a job. I had about three offers in the course of the first afternoon, I chose one studio, I don’t remember why any more. I said I didn’t have my diploma, it wasn’t possible to take it across the borders. They said: ‘Never mind the diploma, sit down here, draw things here for a week, and then we’ll tell you if you’re an architect and if we want you. It worked out fine after that one week.”

“We came to the border guard barracks every morning. They assigned us two border guards, and we drove with them to a huge gate with barbed wire. They worked on the road there for eight hours, the border guards sat bored on tree stumps because there was nothing to do. That was something of a crucible for me, I was so close to crossing that line illegally. There were just those two sub-machine guns in the way. I didn’t do it in the end.”