Ondřej Vaculík

"I was very lucky in this joyless time to have met Radim Vasinka and his Orpheus Theatre. That was in 1972 and at that time Radim Vasinka sent invitations to my father for his premieres. But my dad didn't want to damage the theatre by having him come directly, because he was being watched, so he sent me. Radim Vašinka played at Na Hřebenkách, that's under Strahov in Prague. And I, as an obedient son, went there for one such premiere, or for a rerun, I liked it so much that I took the trolley bus, there was still a trolley bus there. Now the play was such a strange one in my opinion, I was so oppressive, I think there was just something about it that seemed to me like slightly vulgar or unnecessarily vulgar, I don't know, maybe it was Prévert - 'Roura k rouře' or something like that, or Camus of some sort, I don't quite know. But then I gave Radim Vasinka the greeting from the parents and he smiled and said, 'Well, son, it's good that you're here. And I said, "Well, I'm learning to be a bricklayer. "He said, 'So, bring all the apprentices. They'll like it here.'" And he was very brotherly and everything. And I, because I was always writing, so one day I dared to give him something to read and he was very attentive, I guess, to young people and recognized some talent in it and invited me to try - which was unusual - to put on some of my nude plays, plays that I was writing at the time, as part of his theater."

"The last time, or the last time before that, I went to Spešov from Brumov in 1968. That was an interesting journey, I was on a bicycle. It's about 140 kilometres and it was on the 20th of August. I have to say here, what my parents were excellent at, they honored our responsibility, they let us be independent, they trusted our responsibility. Well, and I rode that bike out of Brumov and I spent the night somewhere near Nechanice, or Bučovice as it's called, in the station waiting room, and there was a huge storm. And the dispatcher, or whoever was there, pulled the curtain on the ticket window, which was kind of divided into little rectangles of metal, and he said, when can I sleep and when will the first ones go to work? And it was actually from the nineteenth to the twentieth - I'm correcting myself here. And that night was terribly restless, and there was a storm, and somehow his phones were ringing all over the place, and he had all kinds of reports. Then I got to Spešov quite exhausted the next day and I was glad to go to sleep and I just fell down and slept on the way. In the morning my grandmother woke me up and said, 'Ondrášek, wake up, it's war.'"