Mgr. Ladislav Plch

"That was a wedding! It was the National Committee in Dominican Square, next to the church, there was a woman with a chasuble, a medal and a solemn document... And the few people who were there, they were completely falling down and holding their mouths so they wouldn't burst out laughing. And I thought: What kind of bullshit is this woman talking, it had to be clear that this was a marriage of convenience. Or she was making herself out to be. Or she was such a convinced communist."

"In the sixty-seventh. Then I realised that none of my cheerful friends were still living in the West, that such a gloom had fallen on me, a complete depression. I then, perhaps as I'm not saying the only one, but there weren't many of us, so I then, I didn't swim anymore, but across the Italian border, across the green border, there was no iron curtain. I was sneaking through that kind of growth back to the East, to Yugoslavia. There I slipped through unnoticed. Whether there were any patrols on the Yugoslav side, I don't know. In short, I came back and went humbly, with my head down, to the military service."

"I was promised I could do the PhD, so I had a place booked at an institute there. I had already been accepted to work there as a fellow. It was some kind of scientific institute where they were studying Slavic literatures. That was actually, that corresponded to what I wanted to study. That was in Malburg, where I lived. Well, Chernobyl came along, and there was a Dr. Gedell, he admitted me, he got mad at me then. Because we jumped in the car and drove away from that Chernobyl cloud to Portugal. Mostly for my daughter, who was a year and a half old at the time. So we drove to Portugal, and that's when I lost this job in the science library, already secured. That I didn't get in and that I cowardly fled to Lisbon before the radioactive cloud. So, in fact, my doctoral studies were over."

"And the best thing was, there was a communist housekeeper in our house, who might have been a secret police informer, who lived right above us. She didn't live downstairs as a housekeeper, but upstairs next to the attic. And she used to read the newspaper Rovnost, which was a communist newspaper then, today it's just Deník. And she read it from top to bottom and bottom to top, and there were weddings. And I had a friend in the Rovnost editorial office at the time, and I was running away. He didn't know anything at all. And I said to him: Please, this, this. But he normally, it was already, he took a chisel and knocked it out, there were typesetting machines then, he knocked it out of the machine. That Ladislav Plch and Marie Huserová are getting married at 11 o'clock on 11 June at the National Committee. Unfortunately, I lost the newspaper, I had it hidden because there was a gap. It looked like a technical error."

"I went to Yugoslavia, you could only do that with an ID card back then. And I swam to Italy. I spent six hours in the water, swimming in an unnecessary arc, it wasn't even necessary. And there, if I had been caught, the Yugoslavs wouldn't have escorted me to Czechoslovakia anyway. They would have threatened me - you, you, you - and they would have let me go. I didn't know that then. I found myself in Italy and for three days I slept on the beach, in a cornfield near there. And the depression came over me that at that time, in my generation, in the '67, I didn't know anybody in emigration. The wave didn't come until '68. And instead of going to the police in Italy to declare myself a refugee and express my wish to be sent to the Australian embassy - my dream was Australia... imagine, I normally went back, through the corn, back to the East after three days across the green border."