Petr Procházka

"Because of politics, I went to the army a year early at the age of eighteen at my own request to join Dukla Prague, for various reasons, and I did the right thing. Even though I don't look it today, the smallest compromise we had to make was that we weren't allowed to wear long hair. Of course, it was a military unit, so it was quite logical, even today soldiers don't have long hair, but we had to submit to everything that the party and the government ordered, so to speak, and at any hint of resistance they made it abundantly clear that this wouldn't work like that. We had to make some concessions in our convictions. If someone didn't, they suggested from time to time that, hey, you better be good or you might as well quit here. It happened to one of my colleagues. He refused to take part in what they called an 'extended recovery program', which meant we had to take various medications they gave us, and when he said he wouldn't, he had to quit the national team and quit Dukla a year later. Another friend met a West German girl and they told him, there are enough pretty girls in our country, so find another one. She came to see him a month later, and forty-eight hours later he was out of Dukla because they knew right away that she had crossed the border, and they kicked him out of Dukla. I didn't have that much trouble, but we had to... we all had to compromise."

"We also went to Lithuania once, by train, and it was a powerful experience to see a part of the Soviet Union. It was not what they told us in school, athough Lithuania is a beautiful country. I didn't get to the West until I was 17, and then I also saw it was a little different from what we were told in school. Clean streets, order everywhere, lots of cars that looked like new, motorbikes... The things that a kid at my age looks for the most, so we were shocked. This was, as I say, somewhere around the age of 17, and it meant all the things you've probably heard, border checks, filling out the 'customs declaration', you had to obtain a customs clearance in advance, which I couldn't have done at that age anyway so it was done by some officials somewhere, but it was complicated."