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.”

“To round it off in some way with the year 1989, when I returned after twenty years, it was an enormous shock. You get used to the look of the streets, houses, parks, and cars here really quickly, and then you come back after twenty years. That was such a strong experience that I had to really hold back so as not to talk about it with my colleagues in Brno, that certainly wouldn’t have been the right thing, to confront them with that. On the other hand I was able to rediscover the threads of relationships with my classmates and begin to make a connection with them again. We weren’t in touch much. I corresponded with a few people, then the letters became fewer and far between. Maybe some of them were afraid, or they didn’t have time to write. Besides my parents, I didn’t have much contact with anyone in the end.”

“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.”