Jan Příborský

"I commuted to the telephone exchange at the District Agricultural Administration and got up very early. I always turned on the radio and the first thing I heard was that troops of foreign armies had crossed the Czechoslovak border. And I couldn't think of anything else, cleverly, except that the Germans had invaded us. Well, after a while I got a completely different news, that we were invaded by the Soviet Union. Anyway, it was a shock, but I went to work. And in Olomouc I got another shock, because there were Soviet soldiers there, with machine guns, submachine guns, so we were walking, the passengers who came for work were walking among those soldiers with those submachine guns."

"Why wasn't it possible for a person with a serious visual impairment or completely blind to go to high school, why couldn't it be done?" "Probably because the equipment was not there, neither pedagogical nor.... Moreover, the law did not allow it. The law, for reasons unknown to this day, did not allow it. But about four years after it happened to me, after I was trained, they changed the law and the first school was established, an eleven-year school for visually impaired youth it was called, in Prague. And that's where they took blind people. Only there was no distance learning, and because the parents, as I described earlier, were really toiling with poverty, it was necessary for someone, for us to earn money and help our parents and ourselves. So it wasn't possible, it wasn't even possible, I was already eighteen years old and I couldn't go back to school. The laws were set up that way, nowadays it's a completely different situation."