Jaroslav Róna

“When the Russians came here, I was eleven years old at the time, my family voted whether we’d emigrate or not, so it was decided we’d emigrate. Because we didn’t know what the Russians would do, and Dad thought that they might start loading us on trains to the gulags again. He was phobic about it. So in the summer of sixty-nine we travelled to Geneva, where we stayed in the house of one of Dad’s friends, a furrier, who was very well-off - that’s why they had me train as a furrier afterwards. We were there in emigration for about a month, and then Mum said it couldn’t go on like that, and so she forced us all to get up and back into the car and go back into Communism. At night, sometime in early September we crossed the border at Rozvadov, the only car to come back, and the other lane was jammed up with an endless line of emigrants with fully loaded cars. I looked out of the window, it was raining, the road was covered in puddles, a hole, and the yellowed reflections of lamps at the crossing. Soldiers were standing around, and we slowly drove back into Bohemia, and everyone in that line of cars were tapping their foreheads, so we came back greeted by an endless guard of honour, all tapping their foreheads.”

“Suddenly, 21 August, the radio blaring real loud, and someone sobbing. So I woke up, heard crying, Mum was crying like crazy, the radio was blaring something, a rumbling in the sky and machine guns rat-tat-tat-tating in the city. I thought to myself: ‘Finally something’s happening!’ I was thrilled. Then I got up and looked out of the window. The fence was flat on the ground, there were tank tracks leading from it, and the tank’s barrel was stuck just two metres from my face. I gaped at it all goggle-eyed, and there were five Ruskies there, Mongols with bare shaven heads, in ugly grey clothes, chewing at some mash. I goggled at them, and they at me. What’s going on? So I went into the kitchen and was told we’d been occupied by the Ruskies. So my sister and I, I was eleven, she thirteen, we founded a resistance group. So we wrote these anti-Russian leaflets and put them in letterboxes. Then I drew the field with the tanks and the airplanes, because the tanks were on a field, and I hid it under the bath for future generations. We won’t hide our truth. So I stuck it under the bath, it probably fell apart there. Then we moved away. That was for the future generations, in case we’d die.”