Robert Valík

"I studied for two years at the building industry school, but I was not very good at it and then it was depressing, it was the hardest school in Zlín out of the secondary schools. For example, at the mechanical engineering school nobody was bothered by long hair or jeans, and at the chemical school, there was also a leather industrial school, which was artistically oriented towards the design of shoes and so on, so there was freedom, you could wear long hair, jeans, nobody minded, but at the construction school it was like this, we used to sit in a class and now the headmaster and the deputy headmaster came in and interrupted the class and said: 'Boys, stand up! Face backwards.'So we turned around and now they were just going, 'You, you, you, you, get a haircut! The next day you come in with your hair cut, your hair must not go over your ears and back of your collar.'"

"It was the third grade, the teacher started telling us about the liberation by the American army, how the evil Americans didn't go from Pilsen to help Prague, that it was their shit, and at the same time she claimed it was a hundred: 'That's some fifty kilometers, they didn't come, they could have helped.' And because I knew from home that it was an agreement they couldn’t break, I came home completely devastated, telling how we were being lied to at school. That was third grade, I was eight or nine years old, something like that. And how unhappy I was about it even then."