Luděk Štipl

"We tried to suppoert them from afar. We bought Czech books from Škvorecký and the like. We tried to send some books to Czechoslovakia. Those books which would be certainly seized, we had them rebound with different title and everything so that it would not be found out. When here [in Czechoslovakia] something wrong was happening, we wrote letters to our Members of Parliament. We wrote to the Minister of Foreign Affairs Joe Clark, or to Walter McLean, he was our MP, so that they send, urge, so that they are on their [of the Czechoslovaks'] side when they meet Czechoslovak polititians. We congratulated Ronald Reagan on his birthday. We reassured him that he's treating the other side right. We did our best to contribute and we were glad that it was moving somewhere."

And then one sat on the train in the direction of Břeclav and thought to oneself, maybe just in half an hour, we will be there. Or we won’t be. They could find some pretext. It was nerve-wracking. I was not that daring to say a good-bye with a banner because the last time, my attempt didn’t work out. I tried to be sort of humble. The problem was when the conductor came, not far from the border. She looked at our ticket and she said: ‘Oh, lucky you. You’re going to Italy with all your family!’ And only in that moment the children learned that we are going to Italy. We were going to see our aunt in Brno.’ Those bewildered eyes… ‘And why are we not going to visit the aunt? Why are we going there?’ - ‘Please, now don’t ask me about anything, we’ll explain later, look at the scenery and be quiet.’ Then the searches came, border guard with submachine guns, a German Shepherd crawling under the cars to search in case there was something. The stress that we’re only a few metres away from there. And finally, the train set to motion and we were in Austria. It was a marvelous sight, those neat villages and fields. Tears ran down our faces, after five years of stress, effort and all that money spent, we managed to do it and we were happy.”

“Dad used to tell us about that all since we had been children. We exactly knew what concentration camps and gulags were, how did the [Russian] revolution go, the legionnaries’ stories from Russia. There at the isolated lodge where we lived, I had nobody to tell it to but when I was in Mohelnice, maybe I wanted to brag or maybe I just liked telling stories, in the second, third and fourth grade, I confided about it, I explained to my classmates how it really happened, that the teacher is not right. Later on, I learned about snitches and I knew that there were farmers in Mohelnice who, I think, didn’t want to join the agricultural coop (Šrámek, Kuba and the like), and I became terrified that maybe someone whom I told it can tell at home. And I didn’t know the parents. Maybe they’re snitches, too, or some helpers of theirs, and I became really scared that someone would come to our house and dad will go to jail. Back then, one could get ten or fifteen years in jail just for talking too much. So, I kept observing those people – nope, this one smiled at me and his mom met me and gave me some change to buy ice cream so they cannot be snitches. I lived in this fear for several years, nobody snitched on us but then, one becomes scared of trivialities and I couldn’t confide about this and I was really scared then.”