Jan Švadlenka

"And I even tried to emigrate, for that matter. My friend and I... I was playing for Slavia at the time and I was so fed up with the atmosphere, the regime, that I decided to emigrate. It was arranged and my friend Martin and I took the train to Nuremberg, where he had an aunt who ran a guesthouse. So we naively thought that she would let us stay there with her. But when we got there, she said, 'No, I don't have a place here. There, under the castle,' - there's a castle in Nuremberg - 'there's a hostel there, go there.' We were deciding, and I didn't want to go there because I wasn't doing so badly here. Then I transferred to Xaverov, but I was still playing for Slavia. Or actually, I was already playing for Xaverov. So I said, I'm not doing so bad here, so I don't have to leave. The regime bothered me, like really bothered me. But then I changed my mind. We went to... That was a nice experience, too. We went to the arcade. We won. We slept outside on a bench, the cops came, so we went to the station. We won something and we bought jeans and a ball and all sorts of things. And I was already playing for Xaverov, yes. Because somehow I didn't say goodbye and we played a game and I didn't come there. So I bought a ball, a soccer ball, as a present for Xaverov. To make them forgive me. I told them I was on a trip to Nuremberg."

"Like this, I was five years old, it was an experience. We had just come back from a vacation from Yugoslavia and my father was offered a job in Austria, in Vienna, if he wanted to stay there, because it was just at that time that the Soviet troops came here. So at that time, we were coming back from vacation. In the end, my father decided that we would come back for my parents, he didn't want to leave them. When we were coming back, we met tanks. My parents told me the story afterwards, I don't remember because I was only five years old."