Jiří Prokop

"I'm, I was this close to getting arrested at the time. They took my whole car apart and luckily I had it, luckily I don't think I got hit, right, that was more of a coincidence. Because I had this old Trabant, it was kind of beat up, and I drove it to this Germany, and I left it there in Furth im Wald, and he drove the car there to pick me up, and then we drove around that Germany. And when I came back, we transfered it into that Trabosch, but that's still, I was still there, I was there in the different foundations that were there for those, like our second hand ones now, there were these foundations where you could get like free ski boots or something like that, so full of junk like I got from them, from those non-profits. And I bought a color TV there at that time, so I bought a color TV, kind of a little one, but it was cool, it lasted about thirty years. And I threw it all in the Trabant. The books, or the printed matter we put, the trabant had these like parrot holes, and behind that you could, there were holes, in that car. So we stuffed it into the car, into these cavities of the car. The cops or the customs guys knew it was being transported like that, but I don't think I got denounced, so it was more like a coincidence. If they'd turned me in, I'd probably go to jail. I'd be locked up. So they saw me carrying junk like that, see if I'd cleared it. Well, of course, I said, yeah, I'll clear it. So they took it, and they took the whole car apart, but they didn't take the paperwork off. But like they took it all out under the seats, they took it all out. I had to sit there for about two hours on that border. It was still such terrible weather, like that, snow, rain. Terrible. I couldn't let it show that there was anything there. If they found anything, I'd go immediately. I wouldn't even, they would probably have left my car there and I would have been arrested right then. But yeah, they took something from me, I had some of those magazines like Playboy and that, so they confiscated that, they kept that. And I had to pay for the stuff I got in that, from those, well pay, I had to promise to pay for it because I didn't have any money on me. But I had to clear those shoes and that stuff. They let me load it back in there, so I loaded it back in there and I drove back out and I got all shook up. Because when you come from that, or you came from that West, which was kind of like lighted, and now you came in and now there were these wires, grey, plus the rain and the snow, dark, there was no light at all on our side, it was dark like, it was evening, wasn't it, it was winter, it was dark at six o'clock. The border area was terrible, the transition from the German border area to the Czech border area was terrible. Even when you saw those wires and those soldiers with those machine guns, how they kind of welcomed you there, it was like very stressful."