Jaroslav Róna

“Suddenly, 21 August, the radio blaring real loud, and someone sobbing. So I woke up, heard crying, Mum was crying like crazy, the radio was blaring something, a rumbling in the sky and machine guns rat-tat-tat-tating in the city. I thought to myself: ‘Finally something’s happening!’ I was thrilled. Then I got up and looked out of the window. The fence was flat on the ground, there were tank tracks leading from it, and the tank’s barrel was stuck just two metres from my face. I gaped at it all goggle-eyed, and there were five Ruskies there, Mongols with bare shaven heads, in ugly grey clothes, chewing at some mash. I goggled at them, and they at me. What’s going on? So I went into the kitchen and was told we’d been occupied by the Ruskies. So my sister and I, I was eleven, she thirteen, we founded a resistance group. So we wrote these anti-Russian leaflets and put them in letterboxes. Then I drew the field with the tanks and the airplanes, because the tanks were on a field, and I hid it under the bath for future generations. We won’t hide our truth. So I stuck it under the bath, it probably fell apart there. Then we moved away. That was for the future generations, in case we’d die.”

“I was eighteen and I went to see Zanussi’s film at Star Cinema, the film was called The Illumination. He’s a Polish director, brilliant. The protagonist, a young man, didn’t know what to do with his life, what to do in Socialist Poland, he was completely forlorn. I sat there and told myself: What about you, you’re the same as he is, and you don’t know what, either. And suddenly it was really as if some angel had descended upon me, and I heard a voice in my head: You’ll be a painter. Like some kind of light, as if someone had spoken to me from somewhere. Completely and totally unbelievable. It filled me with the unbreakable conviction that I would be a painter. I said to myself: Oh, so I’ll be a painter. I went home, woke my parents up, told them that I had a vision in the cinema and that I would be a painter. Dad said that if I was accepted to the school, he’d help me with everything. From that moment I began preparing for the exams, I began drawing, and since then I’ve been churning along like a motorised mouse, so I haven’t had a moment’s time.”