Jaroslav Neumann

"A denunciation was sent to me, I found out later, directly from Nuremberg, that I was working for the Eastern Bloc, imagine that. Me, in charge of my own life, working for the Eastern Bloc. They came, they handcuffed me, and they took me to El Cajon, to San Diego, to the prison. I was there for two days. And even luckier, it must have been a coincidence that the night shift - I hadn't been in a cell yet, I was in the 'preliminary' where they put you. And there was a guy there, probably an ex-German, he asked me how I got there. He made sure they called... It's a good thing I had the phone numbers for the NATO base. So they called, and the next day I was released. They gave me breakfast, apologized and took me away in a car. Back home."

"We put our skis down with our backpacks. I had my passport with me. I remember at the border, it was in the evening, I didn't notice where we were crossing, my head was full of something else. I borrowed another scarf with polka dots and tied it around my neck to make me look younger. Imagine that five people got thrown off the bus at the border that day, they had to take their skis out and each go to their skis. That's how the checks were. It was like a prison. I wasn't shaking, I was a bit scared, I'd be lying. To recognize that the passport wasn't mine, how can you do that on the spot like that, when you pull out the passport and put it next to your face - they did that to everybody to see if it matched... So I passed. I can tell you, the first stop was at a restaurant, some people needed to go to the toilet. They were also taking something out of their backpacks that they had with their skis. So I grabbed my skis that I had rented, walked around the bus and ran away."