Miroslav Šik

* 1953

  • “I rented a car and drove towards Czechoslovakia. I arrived at the border. I did not have visa. And there they stood, it was snowing, and there they stood, the Czech, those Czech border control officers. I don’t know whether… they had such a short uniform and on that, they had such brown belts. And the uniform [jacket] rode up all the time. And then they had very narrow trousers, and short, so one could see their socks. And they had dress shoes, and the boys stood there in that snow. They had such a board in front of them and they gave, they gave visa to everyone. Who had courage enough, they got visa and they could go. So I arrived there. So, I got scared. So I returned back to Bavaria. And then I stayed overnight in some, in some pub under this Bavarian feather duvet. Only the other day I dared. And so I went to Prague for the first time. I hard Ford Trans-[sic!], I don’t know whether you know it here, it was a Ford, Mondeo at that time. Very strong car. So I could overtake everything. There were no cars on the road. There were only old lorries. It stank all over the place. Of burning coal, black coal, brown coal. I arrived and I went to Wenceslas Square, I remembered the directions by heart. I went to Světozor [café]. And I got what I had eaten last there, in that year 1969, before I had to run away to Hungary. I got ice cream with some awful blueberries. So I was sitting there and I did not actually know what should I do here. In Prague. Just here. It was sort of January, one thousand nine hundred ninety. And there actually started my odyssey here, in Czech Republic… well.”

  • “Mum who spent the first fifteen or twenty years crying. Who actually most of us… in the family, she was the one who lost the most. Because she was in fact a girl who… she ws born in 1924 so she was called to forced labour. As a half-Jew, she was the first on the high school to be kicked out. She was, like, the first one who was forced labourer in some factory here in Prague. So, for her, it was in fact… the 1968 meant for her that she could go to the university. Yeah. There was a programme for the generation who couldn’t finish their studies during the war. That was her dream. So that she finishes, that it will happen, that she will get a university degree. It won‘t be only that, that political school there which, you know, my mom studied at that Communist, marxistic school but that, that’s the political college, it did not work for her any more. You know, and then suddenly there’s emigration and in emigration, she stays Frau Professor Sik. That’s the way how in that time, woman has the title her husband has, it was totally absurd for her. She is at home, a homemaker, she just cooks. Mom never cooked here in Czechoslovakia, almost never. She was like, that girl who wanted to be emancipated… as much as possible in Czechoslovakia. Obviously, she did the shopping because dad was that normal macho, it means, he did nothing at all and he was not able to do anything. So, mom had two jobs, in fact. And childraising, a third one. And still, she kept that big dream, that emancipation. And now she emigrated. She has money enough, she can buy dresses, she can buy things. She lost all friends, all girls stayed here. And she is the one to suffer most. So she cried all those years, almost a suicide attempt. And suddenly mom, how this thing starts, I think it’s called climacteric… at that time, mom makes a180 degree turn, she gives up everything and cuts off everything from the past. And then there’s 1989 and she says ‘But I have no place to return to. I am home here.”

  • "So we just said our goodbyes and it was such, how the Yugoslavians always do it, always so lively, so there was a wonderful band and everything, music and dance. We went to bed. And we were to, I think, we were to leave in two days, my mom, she was always like that, so she started packing already. And at about 1 am, at night, suddenly we were surrounded with lights that shone inside through all our windows. And when someone of us went outside, there was some, like, secret service, Yugoslav army counterintelligence. And there was, a helicopter landed there. Then, we boarded immediately and in about two hours or so, we were at some airport. And from there, we flew to Pula. From there, we went by boat to some sort of Island where Broz Tito lived. There he had those animals. So, that 22nd August, we are at some island where the parrots are screaming, there was a giraffe and there were some, some, like, predators. And they tell us, there's occupation. That we are guests of the Yugoslav government. That we are going to fly to Beograd, which happened pretty soon, in the evening, we, helicopter, airport, plane... We flew to Beograd. And they drove us in such... The Yugoslavians had those gigantic, huge American cars, automatic. I saw an automatic drive for the first time. I mean, automatic gear transmission. It was what I found the most interesting because to realise that we are occupied... we did not at all, I didn't, nobody did... The only one who realised that was my dad. He was driven separately in another car and later, we found out that he had already contacted Jiří Hájek, the Minister of Foreign affairs who was there, and then some other two Ministers were in Yugoslavia, so that they establish that, sort of, provisional government. Which means, on the 22th, they already sorta established sorta provisional government when those people in Prague were under arrest and they were on their way to Moscow."

  • Full recordings
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    Praha, 02.12.2019

    (audio)
    duration: 02:05:52
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
  • 2

    Praha, 20.01.2020

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    duration: 02:10:23
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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Doma je tam, kde si to protrpíte

Miroslav Šik at five years of age
Miroslav Šik at five years of age
photo: Archiv pamětníka

Miroslav Šik was born on the 7th of March as a son of Ota and Lilly Sik. As a child, he experienced what it means to be a child of a high-ranking Communist official. There were many advantages to such a status that included the possibility to travel abroad or buy expensive Western clothes of which the children of common Czechoslovak citizens could only dream. The family fortunes radically changed after the August 1968 occupation. The economist Ota Šik was one of the foremost advocates of the liberalisation process of the 1960’s and he decided that the family which was spending their holiday in Yugoslavia would not return to Czechoslovakia. The Šik family spent the first few days after the invasion on the private island of Josip Tito and before they were ready to emigrate to Switzerland they used a govermnemt mansion in Beograd. From there, the Šiks moved to Switzerland. Miroslav had problems adapting to life in emigration and during the first year, he kept running away to Czechoslovakia. His brother Jiří refused to accept living as a refugee; he returned to Czechoslovakia only to leave again after 12 years. Miroslav studied at a high school in Basel and then architecture at the ETH in Zurich. The turning point in his life was meeting with the Italian architect Aldo Rossi whose seminars he attended. After having graduated in 1979, he got a research position at his alma mater. During the 1980’s, he started developing the idea of the so-called analogous architecture whose aim is to blend in with the environment without showiness and unnecessary décor. In 1990 – 1992, he taught at the Faculty of Architecture at the CTU and since 2018, he has been the head of Architectural design at the Academy of Arts in Prague. He has been suffering from a feeling of not belonging which stems from the fact that he did not live his childhood in Switzerland. After the fall of Communism, he returned to his home country but not permanently. He lives alternately in the Czech Republic and in Switzerland.