Jiří Henych

“With great difficulty, that’s a well-known fact about the Swiss - that they’re of themselves very reserved people. With great difficulty, when I compare with the current situation, how my Swiss wife is being accepted here and how they approached me back then in Switzerland, it’s completely different. But I have to say that I was helped by the fact that I had married a Swiss. But even her family, that was very, very difficult to start with, because in their eyes I was some sort of troglodyte from the Carpathians.”

“I worked a few months in Skloexport [a glass distribution company - transl.]. Skloexport was in Liberec at the time, because of the glass that was produced in North Bohemia. I worked there and I signed up for a number of different trips, but I was always refused. So I started playing with the idea of moving to Yugoslavia, because I heard that it was possible to get from there to Italy. But it seemed a bit dangerous to me, I was afraid. If things went wrong, I’d end up in jail. So I searched for a safer route to legally cross over into the West. And the only chance I had was working in the factory, they’d never let me out on an official trip at Skloexport. I tried to get on a boat that sailed around Scandinavia all the way to what used to be Leningrad, but I had no chance at all. Then they approved me for this three-day trip, which was a miracle.”

“I didn’t see the regime in any way, we were little children, we marched along as pioneers [the Communist replacement for the Boy Scouts - transl.] on May Day and thought we were bringing happiness to humanity, because they mixed our heads up, quite simply we were manipulated. I remember how in national school one teacher, Mrs Čejková, I still remember her name, we were in the second or third year, and she told us, I’ll never forget that: ‘Children, if you hear something bad about our comrade president at home, tell me about it.’ She was forcing us to denounce our parents. Well, not forcing, but simply suggesting it. On the other hand it was a peaceful childhood because we didn’t understand what was going on. Realisation only started to set in when we were adults, when we saw the people who had the opportunity to go to the West and who came back and told us about it, they opened our eyes to a completely different world. That’s why I wanted to leave, because I didn’t want to stay here, I didn’t want to marry and have children in this country.”

“I don’t know if it was a former concentration camp, but it was the sort of building like they had in concentration camps, it was probably a remnant from the war. That was the American zone, and it housed fugitives from the East, not only from the Czech Republic, but from the whole eastern Socialist camp. And they wanted to check what sort of persons we were, which I can understand. They didn’t lock us in, you could go out; you had to tidy up, a bit like at military service. And you waited there until the commission acknowledged whether your reasons were sufficient to justify them granting you political asylum, or not.”