Viktor Weilguny

"It started with Strahov being completed at the very last minute so that the 1965 Spartakiáda event could take place. Only later did we find out that they had very much saved on the electricity supply cables that distributed the electricity around the blocks, if you know Strahov, there are twelve blocks of rooms. They were always in threes and marked red, blue, green and the twelfth one was grey. There were about six thousand students there. And we paid fot it in 1967, because right from the beginning of the term the electricity started to turn off, the blocks went out, they took different turns, because they interconnected the power lines so that those who didn't have light could have it too, but that put even more strain on the power lines, until at the end of October - the year started on the first of October - the whole Strahov went out. We couldn't work, and in the meantime we were still suffering from lighting candles, many times our drawing burned down when the candle tipped over. At school they didn't ask us if we had finished our work or not, we had a lot of drawing to do on thin paper, there were no computers yet. It was something like the 30th of October, it was the very last days of October... we ran out of patience and set off."

"In 1941, my dad, because he had a German mother - but he had a blue book, he was never a soldier because he was the most malnourished of the eleven children - so he was paradoxically drafted into Hitler's army to work in the rear, supplies, clothes, food. And so he even got as far as Moscow, where he saw the Moscow towers, where they were going to attack. Because it was winter, they sent him home on leave. During his leave he was ordered not to go east anymore, but to go west, somewhere near Belgium, in the Benelux places. There were a lot of Czechs there other than him, and there forty men got together and deserted into the hands of the English. They held them for some time before they were taken to Britain, where they were all checked out. I don't know if they taught all of them, or just my father and his friend, a countryman, how to drive a lorry, and put them as drivers with a co-driver in the UNRRA group, which was to supply food to the population after the Allied landings, to look after them in situations where the Germans had already been driven out. So he made it all the way to Prague."