Robin R. Zoufalík

“So, the plan was to find a way with a car and go through Yugoslavia because my mother had been to Austria the year before and everybody kind of told her that the Yugoslav borders were the easiest to cross. So, we arranged to go to Yugoslavia with another family, and that was a pretty famous doctor in Prague. He was a pathologist. And so that was kind of a cover, that my dad was driving him to Budapest and Yugoslavia so that we could all get out. And they really took just enough, clothes, some pictures, and a couple of toys for us. And then we tried about 14 things to try to get out, which, none of them worked, and luckily none of them we got caught, and the last day before having to go back we went to a border and waited for something to happen. An Austrian, I mean, a German car with a camper trailer came to the border and we were parked next to them. They opened the gate and my dad just cut right in front of them and raced across the border.”

“...What I remember was walking to school and sitting with the school with my hands tied behind my back, well, not tied, but you had to hold them back. I did have one friend that I, by circumstance and chance, when I went to school in the US the first time, he was in the same class in Houston that he was in Prague and the chances of that are pretty amazing. So then, my biggest memory about school is going back and forth walking to school, and I remember one day, I didn't show up back from school and I was gone for about two hours and my parents were, you know, trying to figure out where I was and we were not religious, because you were either Catholic or Communist and so I wandered into a Catholic church and everybody was looking for something. They were down on their knees with their heads down. And as a little kid, I was thinking they were looking for something. So I got down and was looking for whatever they were looking for. And finally, I didn't find anything, so I went back home and of course, my parents were pretty mad at me. But when I told them what happened, they pretty much laughed and explained to me that they weren't looking for something, they were just praying, which was not something that I was familiar with.