Milan Šamánek

“At the time, it was not like now that you can choose, where you want to go. We were just placed. When we finished the faculty, we were given a notice: ´You were assigned here and there, and you have to go there.´ So I went to Uherské Hradiště after graduation. Actually, I went to Zlín, where the regional doctor told me: ´You are going to Uherské Hradiště.´ So I went to a beautiful land hospital in Uherské Hradiště then. And that was my great luck, because my primary doctor had a clinical managing manner. So I was actually in the clinic, even though I was in Uherské Hradiště.”

“I got to America so that a world treasurer of a certain world institution arrived here, and it was supposed to hold a congress here. He came and asked the organizers, who did something here, so they sent him along, among other things. At that time I worked at the Institute of Blood Circulation Diseases in Krč. And he looked at it and said, ´Well, I quite like what you are doing. Could you come and work with me? I could give you a job for you for three months.´ And I said to myself, at that time going to America from here was absolutely unimaginable. So I told him: ´Well, you know, professor, I'd love to. But it's complicated here, the exit clauses and all that you do not know these things at all any more.´ And he said: ´Well, I'm talking to your president tomorrow, so I'll tell him to let you go.´ And then he called me and said, ´Oh, your president said that these young people are leaving for there ...´ So I was shocked, because I never officially heard of anyone he would ever had gone to America. Well, so I got to America in the year 1963.”