Petr Vacek

"Then we went to the Crimea several times, and that was a very absurd vacation, because it was a party vacation, all communists went there. Which was terribly funny, because not many people know this, but under the communists every department store had a special closed floor only for the best comrades, nobody else was allowed there. And there were things in there that weren't anywhere else. And there were grocery stores like that, there was a government grocery store, then in the National Assembly... I know I loved Buko cheese, it was some Danish cheese, and you couldn't buy that at all, you could only buy it in the National Assembly in the cafeteria, so my mother would bring it home when she went there for services. Well, before we went to the Crimea, my mother decided that we had to dress decently, so my mother, father and I went to these closed shops. So that was completely, I was just staring at everything possible. It was just a house at the bottom of Wenceslas Square, I don't know if it's still down there on Wenceslas Square. Is the House of Shoes there? That had been Baťa and they turned it into the House of Shoes. And there were normal floors and the last floor was closed and, 'Well, honor work, comrade, what would you need?' - 'Comrade, I would need shoes...' And now it was just, things that weren't available here. I remember I had some of these cloth shoes, these Nielsen trainers, Jensen! Jensen. And then we went to the Fashion House again, and we bought shirts, trousers, swimwear. We came to the Crimea to that Bolshevik hotel and I found out that all the Czechs who were there all had Jensen shoes and swimsuits, because they all had shopped in the same store."

"The 21st of August found us in Vienna, and that's what my brothers told me afterwards, and actually my mother told me afterwards, that when the world found out, my dad was immediately offered the chance to move to England with his whole family, that they had a job for him in the hospital there and that he could start working there immediately. Well, but my mother, I don't know if it was because they were both communists that she couldn't leave, she just said she couldn't betray her native country, and they came back. And Mum said that the apartment where we lived was suddenly very dirty and there was mud everywhere. Her father, my grandfather, was still living there with us. And then it turned out that the grandfather, when he found out, he felt that he would never see us again, so he stopped changing his shoes and he used to walk around in that flat in his shoes."