Petra Procházková

"The specialization didn't really exist as such in our country. In the 1990s or 1980s, war journalism was not talked about here at all. But I did in 1991... I joined Lidové noviny in 1989, I made coffee there, then they let me occasionally write something, then write more, then I didn't make coffee anymore and I wrote more. And in 1991, there was a prominent Czech journalist, Jaromír Štětina, who was in the Soviet Union at that time, he had been there as a correspondent since '89. And in 1991 he got tired of it because he thought that nothing more than the collapse of the Soviet Union could happen on this planet and that he would just go somewhere else again. He went back to Prague and said that the place was vacant. And those were the days when all the journalists wanted to go to the West. Because we were closed there. So suddenly there was an opportunity to go to America and France and Britain. So everybody wanted to go to the West. And nobody wanted to go to the Soviet Union. So it was left to me."

"First I went to the United States, at that time you were only allowed to go for 21 days. You were given this permission and a foreign exchange promise. You had to beg for it at the police. Then you had to beg at the bank to get money. I didn't even have a passport, I had to get one. And they wouldn't let me go to America, so I forged some paper. I said I was going to Cyprus, and then I used a typewriter - as there were no computers, it was possible - I used a typewriter to type in the USA. I made a lot of trouble and fraud. I went to America, stayed there for about three months. By the way, I actually went there to see Bolek Polívka, who was doing a show there. That was my first trip to the West. And when I came back, after those three months, of course the police investigated me and it was a terrible problem. But at that time, strangely enough, I hadn't been fired from Květy yet, because the editor, Mr. Cudr, liked me somehow. But I was soon fired because then there was the Palach Week in January 1989 and I went to see it with a classmate from the faculty, Marika Táborská. It was the last day of the protests, on Friday. I went there every day and it was her first time, so I was very coolly showing her where to go so we wouldn't get caught. And of course they picked me up on the last day. They picked me up, locked me up for forty-eight hours."