Josef Kraus

"The decisive thing was that then President Svoboda, out of nowhere, or when the communists found that their brains (clever people) were running away, so I was no brain, so two calls came out that people can come back and they would not be punished. I took advantage of this, plus with impunity I received an additional passport, which my wife here issued for me. If it weren't for that, and if she had the desire to come to me with our daughter, I would never return. But this broke me and I was really looking forward to it."

"I thought there would be no problem between Yugoslavia and the West. So, I arrived in Belgrade, it was a turning point, there I went to the Swiss and German embassies that I was a refugee. They said, 'Well, he's running from the Bolsheviks,' and they gave me a monthly visa everywhere. So I went to Switzerland, toured the Alps, and ended up in Lucerne, where I checked in at the office and met with about fifty other emigrants. But they were much more famous than me, a sports champion, a ballerina. And it was in every Swiss city, they treated us beautifully. I mostly hitchhiked, even a lady gave me some pills, in case that I could be sick, those people loved us terribly at the time. And when I got off the train in that Lucerne, I was terribly surprised that I wasn't alone, as I said, there were several of us without knowing each other. And there were red carpets, the Czechoslovak flag and anthem were played and they were crying, we were ragged, and the mayor of Lucerne was crying more than all of us."

"My first dad was a factory owner, my second dad was a kulak, that's how it turned out for me. It is pretty hard to understood today that I couldn't study. Then I happened to go to an agricultural school, where I was dismissed on a school report day in the second year, explaining: 'Dismissed for personnel reasons.' Who dismissed me? Some local party committee, or who. But a man doesn't take it that way at the age of fifteen or sixteen. So, I went to Semtín to improve my cadres profile (a file with information about one´s class background, one´s views and ideological attitudes), where I worked on shifts for two years. But I did not correct the report, on the contrary, I had a serious injury, a burned leg, I fell into a barrel of asphalt. I got out of Semtín and started, fortunately they allowed it after those years, to study high school in the distance and in the evening. And at the same time play amateur theater. And every cloud has a silver lining. In that Semtín, where I was de facto fully committed, I met my amateur comedian colleagues. And we played under Semtín at the time, which the Bolsheviks probably didn't mind, amateur, community theater."