Václav Hora

“So, you sold books of exile publishing houses?” - “But there were only a few of them, you could not make your living of it. So, we got them also from Czechia. But I went for them to Yugoslavia.” - “For Czech books from Czechia?” - “Because they did not do trade with me, with a stupid emigrant. I got some Yugoslav Czechs in Daruvar, Mrs. Sohorová and I always went there - first by train and then by a minivan - and they ordered everything from Prague. They gave [the books] to them because they were glad that Czechs from Yugoslavia were reading. But it was I actually. They were cheap and I smuggled them afterwards - I sometimes had to smuggle them over Austrian border because those idiots there were brash [saying it was] ‘handelsware‘. So, we always went to Yugoslavia, we brought book to Frankfurt and started to offer them in lists.”

“The Czech customs officers, the Border Guard officers boycotted the service. They were sitting in the restaurant on the borders.” - “You mean that they opened them and let them be?” - “They let it be, they let people to go there.” I arrived there from the television service with leaflets. I carried them to the restaurant and started to hand them as they were sitting there. All of sudden the waitress said: ‘Mr. Hora, a Russian is standing behind you.‘ He really was standing behind me, with a gun in a leather... And the car was standing outside and the leaflets could be seen there. He told me: ‘Whose car is it?‘ I said: ‘I don´t understand you.‘ So he ran out of the restaurant and ran towards the borders, towards the border crossing. It was clear that he was running for a backup. So, we quickly got in a car and we went away. It is down the hill from Vojtanov, a first village. I said: ‘Hurry up, hide between the buildings!‘ Out of the road. And really, after a while we saw an armed GAZ with machine guns passing us. Of course, they did not see us. Who knows what they would do to us...”

“The good thing was that as a class of librarians they employed us for a temporary job for example in the Museum of Czech Literature. And they brought the forbidden books there. But they did not let the class of librarians to work there, but the museum one or cultural enlightenment class. And we shared a room in the boarding house. And they said: ‘Man, there are such books there! Couldn´t you somehow...‘ And I said: ‘ Yes, I will pretend to arrive there from Cheb with a big suitcase, I will tell that I had forgotten my key from the boarding house in Pobřežní street....‘ So, I went to the Museum of Czech Literature, to the corridors and they filled my suitcase with books there. I could not even carry the suitcase through the checkpoint of the old codgers there. And so, we stole a lot of books from those collections.”