Václav Šašek

"It always came from the ministry, from the administration that made exit permits and passports, that my travel abroad was rejected. There was a special law for that, I don't remember the number, but then there was a section where there were four things where they could refuse you an exit document. Namely, if you were under sentence, so you were in prison; if there was a criminal case against you, so you were not yet in prison and you were already in custody, for example; then if you had damaged the interests, or damaged the interests of Czechoslovakia or the reputation of the Czechoslovak Republic abroad or wherever, if you said something was wrong here, they could sweep you away too; and the fourth one was the most interesting: if the applicant's journey was not in accordance with the state interests, or anything could be put on it. That was such a, very broad term. And that broad term was always put on me."

"I had a very political background because my father was a tradesman. He had a private grocery store until the year fifty-seven. Just like you have the Vietnamese today, the little shops, it was something like that, it was called a colonial. Because I don't know where it got the name, but I guess when you imported goods from the colonies, it was mostly things that weren't here, coffee and cocoa and different spices and I don't know what all kinds of things... So it was called colonial. Well, that's what my father used to run. So I didn't have a worker-peasant background. Plus my younger brother, who I shared a name with, ran away to West Germany. My older brother, from my first marriage, he was in England. My brother-in-law, he was my eldest sister's husband again, he lived in Italy. And my cousin, my father's sister's son, he fled to France. Of course, all of them without the permission of the Czechoslovak authorities, as it was defined at that time. So I had a very 'good' record, I would have gotten into the mines at most, but that would have been about it."