Leoš Válka

"New and new refugees were joining our quarantine every day. They were all possible nationalities. Among them also Czechs and Slovaks. Some of them told us that they came by a route that someone had advised them through Bulgaria. It was said that there was a border guard who let people in on certain days and hours at some minor crossing just like that, out of love for them. I called them and had an exact description of the village, route, hours and everything else. I dictated it to them, and they believed me so much that they jumped into the Zhiguli. He raised the barrier for them, and they did pass through. We met in Traiskirchen, where we were just painting the roof of the church and hanging on the ropes. They were coming and it was clear to them that it was us."

“Later, I went down that pipe quite a lot because it was a way of getting letters out to people who got away and wanted to let their people know they'd made it. We wore jackets full of letters. The whole building was guarded, patrols with rifles walked around. I once stood on the last sprinkler that holds the drip pipe. We kept the window open in the upper toilet. I was three meters above the ground, standing on the last sprinkler, and a soldier came out and stood underneath me. I was about a meter above his head and my foot was well placed. He suddenly stopped and began to roll his cigar. I thought to myself: He must feel me! I don't think he would shoot me, but it would be a problem. When someone escapes from the camp, it makes life quite complicated. However, he normally lit up and smoked. I said to myself again: I'm in an Indian movie, that's probably not true! After a while he finished smoking and walked away around the corner. I immediately got down and the other boy got down after me. When we were coming back, someone closed the window in the toilet. We climbed up the pipe and couldn't get to the building. The other one took off his shoe and began to break in. He didn't succeed at all because he was afraid to cut into it. In the end he kicked it out and we jumped in."

"We had an acquaintance in Vienna and he had a Czech passport. He himself had Austrian parents, so he had an exception. There was a special status of a person who could travel legally and had a special permit to do so. This was evidenced by a stamp on the entire page of the passport, which was about twelve by six centimeters big and was in three languages. If you had this crazy complicated stamp, but there were no state symbols in it, they would normally let you go at the border. So, once he lent us his passport, I looked at it and picked out all the words I needed and built them into other stamps. For example, I ordered a stamp for the entrance to the building for employees, which contained part of the words I needed. I then used a razor blade to cut out the words that were necessary for mine from the stamps they made for me. The biggest problem was the Cyrillic alphabet, because they didn't have it here. They just didn't do it, so I had to make some letters individually, for example from O or accents. I glued it together and then sent a person in a car with a stamp and a hair dryer to a hotel in Bulgaria. There he met the girl I needed to bring. He used the stamp at the hotel, dried it with a hair dryer and brought her here."