Eduard Strouhal

“In the beginning, in the 1960s and 1970s, perhaps partly also in the 1980s, our work would look the following way: we were receiving texts in English, it was all being written centrally in English. There was a department for political commentaries, another one for technical commentaries, and so on. For instance, a new type of engine was developed, and they immediately wrote up a report on it, and passed it on to all the other language departments who processed it and broadcast. So you had to translate it all and then read it on a microphone. Only later did we get various sections assigned to us. I was in charge of the so-called Economic Weekly, which was broadcast every week and it contained - to the extent which was possible – a summary of all the most important financial and economic events. By the ´extent possible´ I refer to it being time-limited. The broadcast included a summary of the latest economic development, new events which took place on the British financial scene. Its main purpose was to function as a reflection of Britain. To inform people what was going on in Britain and how. We were not supposed to say: this and that is good, and this and that is wrong. You should or you should not do this and that again. We only ought to say: this and that happened for this and that reason. People explain it in this or that way. And it was up to our listeners to form their own conclusions of it.”

“Since this place was very near the borderline, along this field path there were watch boxes for the guards to hide in. But you could not see whether there was somebody inside them or not. And I really became afraid when the guy who was our guide got into a ditch and pulled out a revolver. He placed it behind his belt and said: ´If they come and want to see our documents, I show it to them.´ Fortunately there was nobody there. So we went through the forest and crossed the borderline. We also met some people in the forest, but luckily they turned out to be some smugglers. We crossed over to Austria; however, that part of Austria was occupied by Soviet armies. (...) We took a train to Vienna in order to reach the western zone. Fortunately the Russians did not search our train and we arrived to Vienna.”

“At first we were in Austria; it happened by coincidence, for my friend, who was active in the Social Democratic Party, had connections with people who were involved in helping other people get across the border. And just at that time one man returned from Austria to lead the then minister Bohumil Laušmann over the border, but he learnt that the minister now did not want to go into it, and that he had nobody whom he would lead over the border. That man did it also partly for profit. So this opportunity arose that instead of minister Laušman he would get us on the other side of the border. We met him, went by train to southern Moravia, it was somewhere near Moravské Budějovice, then we took a bus. The situation became quite critical, our guide probably knew what was going on. We were waiting at a bus stop, and there was a cop who kept looking at us. And when the bus came and we got in, we saw that the cop stopped some guy on a motorcycle and made him follow our bus. We did not pay much attention to it, but we could sense that the man who was with us was aware of it. But accidentally, that guy with the cop on the motorcycle overtook us, and rode on. Our bus was just approaching another bus stop, so we got off immediately and quickly walked to the forest.”

“People did not write political letters to us. They wished to listen to a particular recording. But you could see that people did listen to those programs. It was not possible to find out whether the people who wrote these letters listened to other radio stations as well. Later, in the 1980s, when people became able to travel abroad more, some forms of research were being done. BBC has it own listeners’ opinion research department. And BBC hired a company in Germany and their employees would be travelling on international express trains through Germany, and when they heard someone speaking Czech or Slovak, they tried to get their opinion. Like whether they listened to those programs, what they did, and so on. Some people refused, but others were willing to talk. We cannot tell how reliable this method really was, statistically speaking, not too much probably. I can imagine if they asked somebody on an international train, that person had a good reason to believe the interviewer was a secret police agent in disguise. That’s the way it was, but there were also people who did answer our questions.”

“Although I cannot prove it, I remember a case of my ´personal evaluation,´ done regularly by my boss… Not the director of the Czechoslovak section, but the Central European section chief. Your personal evaluation profile was written by your immediate superior, but it was his boss who then discussed it with you. In case you wanted to complain about your boss, there you had a chance to voice your objections. And this director was a Hungarian, and he asked me what I thought of that. I told him, that was some time in June, before the invasion, that I doubted the Russians would just let it go. For if they had, their whole empire would just collapse. The personal evaluation interview was over, after a year I go to my personal evaluation interview again, with the same gentleman, and he looks at it and says. ´You see, you were right then.´ But I have no evidence for it, there are no documents of it left anymore.”