Jaroslav Novák

“One time we had to make a landing, and it was not because of an enemy attack. What happened was that we took off at night, and we were to fly for about 2000 km in the Atlantic, such was our effective range. And in order to get there, we had to take additional fuel tanks. Those external fuel tanks were really big; it was made of some asphalt or something like that. And they were affixed in the aft. And we took off at night, fully loaded, and what happened when the plane went nose up was that the fuel moved to the rear part and the fuel tank broke. And those hundreds of liters of petrol flooded our airplane. All the electronic instruments were there, if the petrol got into contact with that and there was a single spark, we would go up in flames like fireworks. But my pilot - because our airport was on the coast, it was at night, 11 p.m., so my pilot dropped all the bombs we had, those that explode under water, he dropped them to the sea, we were still overloaded, but he – it was at night, in strong wind – but he did manage, Honza did manage to land with it safely. We got out and kissed the Mother Earth, for otherwise we would have been reduced to ashes in two minutes, nothing would have been left of us.”

“When I still served in Ruzyně in the transport regiment, I had a passport valid for all countries, because I flew to Moscow, London and Paris, and so my passport was valid for the whole world. And when I was leaving the air force, I went to the Department of Defence and they gave me a special permit confirming that I could keep the passport. So I had the passport, and then they charged me with having stolen that passport. They sent two secret agents to my place. At three o’clock in the afternoon they knocked on my door and pulled out their guns: ´Are you Mr. Novák?´ So I slammed the door in their face, but he thrust his leg in there and they jumped on me and pushed me in a chair and said: ´And now we want the passport!´ And I replied: ´You have no right to take it, I have a permission to keep it.´ And when I showed them the document, they began to apologize – by chance, I knew one of those men, he was from the air force - so they apologized and said: ´Well, you know, we have to do it, we have to take the passport from you, we will check it, and then we will give it back to you.´ But they did not give me the passport back and the Ministry of Interior told me: ´This passport got lost and you will not get it.´ And I asked: ´What do you mean?´ They replied: ´If we don’t find it, you will not get it back. If we don’t find it anywhere, you will never get the passport back.´ So I went to the Ministry of Interior, they had a visiting day. First time I went there without my uniform, knocked on the door, nobody answered. So I entered, there was a guy and two cops sitting behind a table, and I said: ´Good morning.´ He did not say a word. ´I am coming in the matter of my passport.´ And the guy got up, walked to the door and said: ´Out!´ I grabbed him by his necktie and wanted to hit him, but those two cops jumped up, got hold of me, and kicked me out. They kicked me in my ass and threw me out. So the following day I put on my uniform, and went there again, and I got to that office. And they apologized, that a mistake was made, and so on, but they still did not give me the passport. They said: ´You can now submit your application.´ But at that time, applying for a passport was a six-month long process before you eventually got it. So from four o’clock in the morning I waited in front of the Ministry of Interior, only to get a permission to apply and to possibly get the passport.”

“An interesting thing occurred when I was to leave for South Africa and work for that South African company; at that time the South African government told me: ´OK, we can give you a permanent residence permit for South Africa, but you need to have 50 pounds on your bank account, to prove that you have 50 pounds in the bank, because we don’t want people who don’t have any money.´ And I did not have those 50 pounds. Eventually I talked to some guys, they were Jews and my friends from the army and they told me: ´Look, you will carry this suitcase for us, pass with it through the airport customs in London and we will give you 50 pounds. I said: ´No.´ I did not believe it. But I had no other possibility, so I eventually asked: ´OK, then, what’s in that suitcase?´ There was costume jewellery, and I said: ´I will take it then.´ So I took the suitcase, closed it in the aft of the Junkers, we flew to England with Junkers 252. And I left it in the airplane and went to the hotel, and in the evening I came back to the airport and told the customs clerk: ´I forgot some of my things there, could I pick it up?´ He said: ´Fine, go pick it up.´ So I went there, took the suitcase and ran with it to Baker Street, have you ever heard of Baker Street? Have you read anything about Sherlock Holmes? So Sherlock Holmes was supposed to live on that same address. So I went there and found the guy who was supposed to give me those 50 pounds. He paid me 50 pounds, I gave him the jewellery, and the following day I ran to a bank, because our departure for Prague was at 11 a.m. And I told the clerk to deposit the amount from the cheque to my account. And he looked at it and said: ´But the cheque is invalid. I almost fainted, and I thought: what to do now? Well, anyway. I was thinking: if they had caught me with the goods in England, they would have put me behind the bars. I said to myself: it will be better to be imprisoned in England than to be in a communist prison at home. Anyway, I could not get the money, and I could not get the permit for South Africa. But I got to work on it, and I eventually went there once more and the guy really did give me a new cheque which I could deposit, and thus I was given the permit for South Africa.”

“We were then in two jails on the border between Slovakia and Hungary and we eventually ended up in the town of Hnúšťa. That was a tiny town and we were tried there and sentenced to seven days of imprisonment, because we claimed we did not have any money, although we had them sewn under the lining of our clothes. And when the trial was over, they brought us to a prison cell under the courtroom, and then late in the evening the judge went to see us there, and told us he could not have done otherwise, he had no means to acquit us and let us go, because many of his colleagues were Slovaks who sided with Germans rather than with Czechs. And he eventually said that he would try to help us. And he did. There was an old warden, a man about 75 years old. At that time, a warden and a judge stood socially on very different levels. So when the warden was invited for a drink with Mr. Judge, that was something amazing for him. And they made him so drunk, and when the warden became pickled, at eleven at night, they opened the jail for us and let us escape.”