Rudolf Skaunic

“I tried to explain to the man, that is the comrade deputy, that I’d proposed an improvement, but the committee keeps refusing it. He said: ‘What is it?’ I said: ‘It’s simple, we have a foreign export plan, and we can fulfil it very easily like this: we’ll export our Czech planners to West Germany, they’ll establish our system of planning there, thus ruining the local economy, so that we can then export anything we like there.’ I told it to him in this anecdotal kind of way, and my friends started kicking me under the table: ‘But he’s responsible for the plan at the ministry!’ He very graciously waived the matter aside, but we weren’t friends any more.”

“The bad luck was that we went to say goodbye to our friends, and we agreed to set off at six a.m. Of course, the goodbyes couldn’t be said without a bottle, not that we drank it up, but I was delayed. So they managed to phone us up from Technoexport to say that the Six Day War had just broken out in the Middle East and that we weren’t going anywhere. So just imagine the disappointment when you’re all ready to go, you’re just about to set off, and then you don’t go anywhere. Luckily, the war ended in six days, and they gave us permission to leave three weeks later, and we went via the Balkans, Istanbul, and Ankara.”