Pavel Taich

"It was a very complicated matter. For one thing, one had to have a passport, one had to apply for it only when one had an invitation. Then he only got an exit clause, it wasn't over yet. Then he had to have a transit visa through Germany, which of course was issued by the French embassy in Prague, because Germany did not have a representation, a Belgian one, because you drive through Belgium for several hours just to get from Germany to Ostend by the sea, and you had to have a visa for that. Each visa had six photos. It was unimaginable, I don't know how we did it back then, but the desire to see was so great that we really did it."

"And then only at the end of the war, when Pardubice was bombed, i.e. the petrol station in Pardubice and the petrol station in Kolín, there were air raids, so the sirens were blaring, we walked, or we ran, a bit over there, today there is the entrance to the horticulture colony, there was a line of trees, such a line of plum trees, there was a well, there was drinking water, and it was about 200 meters from us, so everyone ran from that end there when the sirens sounded, because no one knew where the bombs might fall, indeed they didn't have to hit Pardubice either, sometimes it happened that the bomb fell somewhere else. There we waited until they blew the horn and went home again. We were kind of protected there by the trees, so there would be some protection if the bombs fell. But fortunately, nothing happened here in Přelouč, they were quite accurate there, in Pardubice, or rather in Svítkov."