Vladimír Michálek

“It continued like that until I was about 14, which is when my family presented me with their vision for my life – the way they saw it. They said they had a couple of friends at a factory where I could get my electrician training. Then, I could get a chance to, say, repair elevators in a factory in the Most area. And if I joined the communist party and the militia, I would stand a fair chance of receiving an apartment in a prefab block somewhere in Hostomice, or whatever the place was called. I realised that while I didn’t know what I wanted in my life, I knew for sure I didn’t want that. So, I packed up and fled for Prague at age 15.”

“When we went to school, first class, it was 1962. It was so pompous – everybody was a ‘pioneer’, and we all had to be. We actually wanted to be ‘pioneers’ very much. When I told my parents that I was looking forward to being a ‘pioneer’, they didn’t say anything; they were kind of patient about it, but they didn’t have the guts to tell me: ‘No, you’re not going to be one.’ They wanted to stay kind of ‘invisible’, which I only started understanding later when I realised there were conflicts involved. To us, though, it was fun more than anything. Our class teacher owned a Moskvich [car] and called it Little Ivan. Her husband was the primary school’s headmaster, and he was sadistic; he would beat us hard. It seemed natural to us. We didn’t really perceive the politics too keenly.”