Jiří Jírů

“I made up a scenario how to get, no, how to buy a second hand car in the West and that I would get it from a young Belgian girl as a present. I had to go to the customs office, arrange everything..I found a young Belgian girl willing to sell me the car but for “official purposes“ it would be a gift. I had a few hundred dollars then. I wanted to buy a Beetle. So, I left for Belgium, had a permission to travel and – now I remember a funny story with the customs officer. He says: Why is she giving you the car? And I say: Hm, I don´t know. Maybe she loves me. And he says: Well, I´d like to have that as well...I ´ll give you my address. They knew perfectly well this was all made up but couldn´t prove it. So, I leaft for Belgium, stayed with a friend and the next morning he says: You have Russians at your home. And I say: Stop it, will you? We´d been telling the same jokes for half a year. This was in 1968. In fact I left a day before the invasion. On one hand I am glad, on the other I feel sorry that I took no photos of this event.“

„And then I worked for an agency but they didn´t let me take photos. And I had already been an accomplished photographer when I left. I had worked for a number of newspapers and magazines – well Květy, Literární noviny, Signál, what else? What else was it? Svět v obrazech there was also Hájek, the famous photographer. Of course, all this with the help of my uncle, because already at the time he was an editor-in-chief of Fotografie, the famous magazine that he himself established. It was a quarterly. Of course, it had to come out in the Russian and Czech versions and it had supplements in English and French. But in the beginning it came out in Russian and Czech. And he, before I left, had once in a while accepted a photo of mine. I was paid 100,- crowns and it was really big money.“