Miroslav Ihnačák

“In December 1985 I got on a train in Košice and got off here, in Bratislava, since there were already people waiting for me. I was leaving on December 26, it was on the St. Stephen’s Day, yet before I went to say goodbye to my friends on a party, and on December 27, I got off the train in Bratislava. I was wandering the downtown streets as we were supposed to meet at five in the hotel Carlton. However, I suspiciously thought about everyone looking at me back then, that he/she was spying on me. The whole runaway was perfectly organized, though. A diplomatic car came to pick me up, I got in and they drove me through the borders all the way to Vienna. They only warned me about three upcoming controls, that we would stop three times, during which I was supposed to be completely quiet in the car’s trunk. So, since I was prohibited to travel to the West, I had never seen or crossed the border before. They only told me, there will be military, police and customs control, but I don’t exactly remember the order in which they checked us. When I got out of the car in Hainburg, for me it was like going from a night to a day. Even though it was night and dark, everything was lighted up there and back home everything seemed so dark. For example, back home, since five o’clock, it was dark everywhere, no lights shining, no adverts displaying like today. Nothing. But when I got over the border, everything was lighted up … so that was how I managed to cross the border.”

“When they managed to acquire all the papers, we tried to get on the first plane flying to Canada. We went from Vienna to London, from there to Vancouver and from Vancouver across the whole Canada, way to Toronto. I had a security guard. Altogether, five cars left from the flat: two were in the front, two in the back and I was in the middle one. There were soldiers from the Canadian embassy, Austrian policemen with sub-machine guns; simply, it was like a scene from an action movie. At first, we headed to the embassy, where I had to sign all kinds of documents, they took my picture and I received a Canadian Travel Document. Then we went by cars directly to the plane on its flight path. We didn’t pass through any control; the plane was waiting just for us. We got off the car, went up the stairs, and the plane was starting up.”