Jan Vaculík

"When I came for the entrance exam and appeared in the respective classroom, they identified IDs and stuff. I wasn't on the list. The lady says, 'I don't have you here, you can't take the exams. Go to the study department and find out there, then.' So I went to the study department, meanwhile the others started writing the exam, and the lady there searched some lists and said, 'That's strange, your application form is lost. But a month ago, when we were calling you, you were on some list. And now you're not on the lists and your application is not here.' I was a bit scalded by that. The lady said a surprising thing. 'You know what, write out the application again and go do the test. Just write down your name for now.' And now she gave me the double sheet. Of course, there were a lot of testimonials, stamps put in that double sheet before, there were about seven different institutions that had to express themselves. ROH (Revolutionary Trade Union Movement), the party, and so on, the school... And suddenly I had this paper that had been going on for three months before, and I was always happy with every other stamp that came in, that nobody had messed up this time, so I had that paper in front of me completely clean. I just wrote my name on there, went to class. Meanwhile, twenty minutes had passed from the test, so I had a third less time than the others. I was very nervous about it. When I finished, I handed it in and went to phone the head of the apprenticeship, who had previously told me to choose the school I wanted. So I told him how it turned out. And he says, 'They're whores, aren't they?'"

"It was an awful lot of different impressions. I can't generalize it with anything. Just the fact that we flew by plane to Copenhagen and from there we took a boat... We spent one night in Copenhagen and then this huge boat that has four or five decks above. Kong Olaf I think it was called. The ship sailed overnight, of course. We slept there in a café because our parents were saving money, they hadn't provided any cabins. And then we got kicked out of the café. Parents persuaded them that my mom and I could sleep on the lounge chairs, but dad and Ondráš wandered around the ship looking for a place to rest. Eventually, they found a warm spot on the upper deck behind the chimney, a cabin with a wooden bench and even a blanket, and they had a great sleep there. And when they left there in the morning, they found that it was the ship's compound. (...) We were also there on the mountains. Dad and Ondráš said that in the morning they would climb a hill. And then they went up it and almost died there, because there are no scales in the very rocks. It was far away, there was no road, it was a terrible stupidity. But they didn't die either."