Lubomír Vávra

“And then I had this experience, a stupid one, but it was good too. I had a camera, and that camera, you probably wouldn’t know it, it was a Fokaflex, a bakelite potato, you can imagine the quality. So I took it along with me so that I could make some pics, and my bike, and as I arrived at night, because that car would go for fifty kilometres, not more, it used a hundred litres for hundred kilometres so it was awful. So, I arrived there, parked it at a designated place at the barracks and went to bed. Our commander was a Russian, a Russian colonel who was assigned to our unit and he was curious so in the morning, he went there and saw my bicycle and the camera there and he thought straight away that I was a spy. Thank god there was a corporal with him who did some photography and who explained that with that sort of camera, I cannot do any espionage at all.”

“My first trip, for the first time I went there on my own, at the beginning, I made the first two or three trips on my own so I had studied a map of Berlin. At the borders, it was all the same, all the checks. On the way there, it was okay, just on paper, but on the border with Berlin, I mean, between East Germany and West Berlin, it was much worse, there were person searches, even when I went there, I don’t even mention the way back. And at our borders, it was the same. But the stuff we brought, thank God that we could go by car after some time. Sister helped a lot in all the things, she was aware that I organised my dad’s burial and so on and so on. So we would always bring goods not available here and to be frank, what was available? Almost nothing. So we would bring all sorts of things and later when we had children, even more so, the car would be quite overloaded.”