Ing. Štěpán Benda

"Formally, it was indistinguishable. I think there was a stamp. I have kept one of my passports, I don't know if I have it. I got the impression there wasn't one, just the processing... it was the personnel department that had to process the necessary entry visas and you got an envelope with passports and money and some other things, well, when you came back you handed in the passport and it was lying in the company and you couldn't... But they could tell it was a business passport, there must have been a stamp somewhere, a department or something must have been there, but formally the passport looked the same."

"I think he has asked for pardon twice since that year sixty-eight, it was discussed with the result that it was not accepted. Then he sent the last one in the year eighty-nine or something like that and he was told that somebody had to file it here - as in a Czech citizen had to file the application for him, for the rehabilitation, so he wrote his curriculum vitae on that account and I applied for the rehabilitation, it went through with that, that - and the decision of the court was that it was acknowledged that he was wrongly convicted and so on, however, that he left the republic in a secret way, unofficially, so that he committed an offence, however, with the fact that he has been abroad so long that the offence for secretly crossing the state border is time-barred."

"He was on the non-communist side, as a member of the leadership of the People's Party at the time, so he was told that he would be targeted too, he was threatened by some, he also had acquaintances, of course, so sometime in mid-February, in March, someone came to him, I remember him telling us, came to warn him that the clouds were closing in on him, that it would be convenient if he left. So the story went like this, that my father left with Dr. Bunža and Dr. Bunža's brother, he was a co-member, that is, an associate of his from the parliament, they left illegally in a wagon with furniture from Stod through Folmava to Germany and we were left here, three children - I was eight, the older sister was two years old and the youngest sister was two months old. We were going by train, we were supposedly supposed to get to Cheb, and someone was supposed to help us cross the border there. This was arranged in a strange way, however, so my mother, when she saw on the train outside Pilsen that someone was following them, lost her nerves, I don't blame her at all, and got off with us in Mariánské Lázně, where she had a brother."