Vladimír Kříž

"The worst were the so-called emigrant dreams. Dreams that you had at night and I had them for about a year and a half to two years. And even Josef Škvorecký told me that they also had emigrant dreams. Many friends who escaped and whom I met there told me that. What is it? That's what you dream at night, that you're back home again, that I'm back in Jihlava, that I've seen my mother and we're having a toast with my friends. I'm happy in that dream and I tell myself that it's good to be home again. In the dream I was with my mother and friends again. Suddenly, in the dream, you realize with horror that you don't have a passport, that they won't let you back, that you won't be able to go back to America. I always woke up frightened."

"We were already prepared to go to Romania and this has made it a lot faster. I definitely didn't want to stay long as I didn’t want to do anything for them. Because I wouldn't have done it. So I probably would have ended up badly. I would have ended up very badly. I would have refused and they would have come back with the paper that I signed and I would have... it would have been bad. I knew there was no choice but to get out. To either run away or get arrested."

"When I came home, my mom hugged me, of course, and my friends came over. Everything I dreamt of as an emigrant came true. I slept at night. I went to bed, and when I woke up, I suddenly saw a figure coming towards me. It was my mother and she was telling me not to worry anymore, that I was finally home. That I'm home. And she came and tucked me in and plumped my pillow. And still to this day, when I think about it, I almost cry, because it was very beautiful and touching. That's when I knew I was home and that everything was over."

"Unfortunately, I was also in compulsory military service during the occupation, the occupation of our republic by the Warsaw Pact troops. We wanted to defend ourselves, immediately, as soon as we found out that the Russians were occupying us, Havlíčkův Brod, where I was, was occupied by the Poles. And we immediately told the officers that we wanted weapons and that we were going to defend ourselves. They didn't give them to us. They didn't give them to us, so the boys at least took pickaxes and they broke these big red stucco stars on the barracks, they broke those. And we just couldn't do anything, we couldn't do anything."

"They took me into a car and drove me to a forest near Brno, to a really deep forest somewhere, I think it was somewhere near Macocha, because they stopped in the forest, there were three of them, and they said that if I didn't sign a cooperation agreement, they would have to monitor me. I was invited as a consul to all sorts of, well it was quite fun, to Prague, to all sorts of receptions at foreign embassies. For example, the Koreans invited me to a reception. And they said they needed to keep track of these people. And I said, "I'm not signing anything." "Well, it’s your choice. We've got so much on you, we've got this file on you. So you’d go to jail for a few years or we can throw you in Macocha too, we already threw one student in there." That's what they told me. So I said, "Well, look." I thought of something, I thought of, I thought of Švejk again. And I thought, if they're like that, I'll be like that too. So I said to them: "If I sign what you want." I thought of Faust, how Dr. Faustus signed the contract with the devil. "Look, but what for? If I sign it for you, what will I get in return?" And they said, "Well, what do you want?" And I said, "Well, I'd like to go to Romania with my wife, where there are, where I want to photograph the monasteries near the Soviet border, there are these beautiful monasteries with colorful frescoes, and I'd like to photograph that." So they discussed it for a while and then said, "Well, you can, you can go to Romania, you can't escape from there." And I did."

"89, Eduard Ingriš was the first one, out of nowhere my phone rang and it was Eduard Ingriš from Salt Lake Tahoe. "Vladimír, the communists have fallen. It's over. You can go home, we can go home." Unfortunately he didn't get to go home, he was very ill and he died in '91, he never got home. But I did go, I left immediately in '90. We celebrated with champagne, we all drank at once. Jarmila said, "Go to the store and buy champagne." We already knew we were going home, so it was amazing."