Ing. Karel Válka

"In Austria, we saw a whole different world. For example, you would drive through a village and a local farmer would open his gate in the morning as he left and he would keep it open all day. When it would get dark and he’d finished his day’s work, he would return and nobody would steal anything from him the entire day. And when Czechs started coming, the Austrians started closing those gates. But we still had a glimpse of the times when the gates would stay open all day and nobody would steel a thing. And the farms? They were so clean! There was no mess hidden away behind those gates. There were flowers in the courtyards, and everything was tidy. When we started going there, after the Revolution, there were nettles all the way to Mikulov and then from Mikulov onwards they were all cut back. Or when we would receive photos from Germany before the revolution, I would ask my mother: 'How is it that in Ettlingen, where those relatives of ours live, the banks around the streams are all cleared and flowers grow there?' She would say: 'You know, Kája, they have their own gardener. Each town has its very own.' Well, that was a completely unacceptable and unbelievable concept back here. Now those gardeners exist here, too, but during the communist regime and even after the Revolution, we couldn't have imagined it. It was, of course, due to the fact that we were isolated, but it was also due to the fact that people’s comfort...that the regime didn’t really care for the aesthetic side of things and only kept the basics truly necessary to fulfil basic human needs like eat and feed and drink, and everything else was secondary. I know that some great pieces of art were created in our Republic, too, and many other things, but ordinary life was quite often a struggle. And to take a breath and see the bigger picture was not really supported, and if it was it had to be state-controlled."

"A lot of people joined the party simply to improve their living conditions. And after 1968 it was the same. Everyone who wanted to have at least some small advantages had to cooperate to some extent. We all got our hands dirty, some more and some less. When someone makes a hero of himself today saying that those who didn’t experience those times, can't really know what it was all about…” – "You too had to make some compromises, too?" – "We all did. I was in the Pionýr movement, I was in the Czechoslovak Socialist Youth Union, I even led the Pionýr in high school. In college, for example, if you wanted to get a good grade in political economy simply and quickly, you would sign up for this so-called Student Scientific Professional Activity and write some kind of thesis, some short paper on a political topic, and then you would pass the exam with no effort, you’d even get the best grade. A classmate of mine and I, after she found out that I was good at writing about these topics, we wrote this kind of thesis and easily passed the exam."