Peter Lenek

“Concerning that provocateur, we were in a hotel in Alps for about two days. We sat with him, the driver, in a restaurant. He began talking with us and he wanted to provoke us: 'You know what I just heard in a radio? Czechoslovakia has signed a treaty with Western Germany on yielding emigrants back to their homeland.' Such a thing he made up, since he probably hinted we wanted to emigrate. I said: 'What?! If someone would like to emigrate, the Germans won't accept him, they shall drop him off at our borders and here he shall have great troubles for which he'll be imprisoned.' That's how it worked during socialism. If someone emigrated, he was automatically tried in his absence in Czechoslovakia and sentenced to two-three years if imprisonment for illegal leaving of the republic. Of course, his property was right away confiscated by the state. We know how it used to be done. The communist bosses then shared the property for dirt cheap. It was enough to own a red book and one could literally own a house for few bucks. That's how it worked and many people still use this way of property gaining up to the present. The driver told us this, but I didn't want to believe him, since I didn't know. I just knew my friend wanted to emigrate. That was the truth. There were forty-five of us travelling by bus and only twenty returned back. From the younger ones it was just me and one married couple, returning from their honeymoon in Germany. All other young people stayed in the West. Majority left the group in Munich.”

“After the graduation from grammar school I applied for medical studies at the university. I wasn't accepted and I found out it was because of lack of free places. As a second school I chose the Faculty of Natural Sciences, where I liked biology-chemistry specialization. Worse it was with the school policy and the compulsory subjects in each year, as for example: scientific communism, Marxist-Leninist philosophy, political economy and history of the working movement. These were the four compulsory subjects that had to be passed during the socialist era. I didn't like them; I had a really big problem with them. Throughout the whole year, only once I attended the lecture of Marxist-Leninist philosophy, as fortunately, the lectures were not compulsory. The exercises and seminars were mandatory. I had a serious problem with them because I was a great music fan. I didn't take it as I wanted to oppose to anything. I used to travel to Hungary a lot, where I bought music records and t-shirts, which became the sticking point. My mom bought me a sweat-shirt in Hungary with a big sign of American California University Los Angeles. One day, professor Cirbes, the head of Department of Marxism and Leninism invited me to a 'talk'. That was such a turning point in my life, because he asked me: 'Why do you promote western American imperialistic university on your clothes, comrade Lenek? Why don't you promote our Pavol Jozef Šafárik University?' I was so caught unawares that I didn't know what to reply. I told the truth, as I was taught to do during my whole life: 'Comrade professor, if you made t-shirts with our university sign, I would love to wear them.' Just to explain, nothing like that existed, no one produced anything alike. Thus, since I contradicted him, he only managed to say just one word: 'Out!' and I was kicked out of the study room. This is how I started up my troublesome era.”