The bus departed from Prague around 1 or 2 in the afternoon on October 28, 1965. There were around 30 passengers on the bus, most of them in pairs or small groups who knew each other. I did not know anyone on the bus. My jaw was still swollen from the tooth extraction that morning and I was not very sociable. The whole group traveled on a single collective passport, which was the standard arrangement for these CEDOK bus tours. The only exception were 2 middle-aged doctors on the bus who had their own individual passports.

The Traiskirchen camp for refugees was an old army barracks complex, fenced off with a guarded entrance. There were 3-story barracks buildings alongside the street and inside the complex there were other single-story houses. We were taken under guard to the 3rd floor of one of the barracks buildings. The majority of the people who had been interrogated with me in Vienna were placed in the first half of the 3rd floor. Myself and a couple of other new arrivals were taken to the second half, which was isolated from the first half under lock and key. I was assigned a cot in one room and there was a common bathroom for our half of the floor.

Everyone in the camp was unhappy with AFCR — they were not very helpful. Papanek, who I think was the original founder of the organization, retired or left not long after I arrived. Some Czechs who had emigrated to Canada complained about Major Jerabek, and in January he was replaced by Dr. Adamek. Dr. Adamek came to the camp and told everyone how he would change everything and make life easier for everyone. He explained that he was a veterinarian — not a medical doctor — that he had been very successful, and he showed us pictures of himself with his Cessna airplane and told us he was closely connected with the CIA. He was basically trying to impress everyone.

The camp wanted everyone to find work outside the camp and not need the food coupons. I was lucky, since one of the guys about my age from the isolated section of the 3rd floor was married and both he and his wife had the same occupational training as I had, as a radio mechanic — which today would be called an electronic technician. His wife, before we were released to the free camp, had somehow found a Czech speaking owner of a small factory in Vienna that assembled radios. The owner offered them jobs and also hired me.

The gas station was owned by a man named Mr. Konir, who spoke Czech fluently. It was near the center of Vienna, though quite a walk from the Baden train station — we called the train to Traiskirchen in Czech “Badenka”, since Baden was the end station. The gas station was in the courtyard of a building block that had 2 exits. There was a room where the gas station attendants waited, and there was an office where Mr. Konir sat in a white coat greeting customers. Next to the office was a car bay with an underground area where the mechanic could do oil changes and work under the car, and next to that was another bay with a drive-on lift and pressure water hose hookups on each side. That was where we washed cars. Most of the time we washed the outside of the car and also lifted it to wash the underside. Some cars we had to wax and sometimes we had to apply an oil-type undercoating to protect against road salt in winter. The courtyard had enough room to park about 24 cars and on average we washed 1 car every half hour. Mr. Konir had one supervisor, Hans, who did not speak Czech and who kept everything running smoothly. All tips were shared equally between all of us. On Saturdays around 2PM, when there were no more scheduled cars, we had to clean everything spotlessly. Mr. Konir called this “Zammaramma” — supposedly a Czech nickname for the big household cleanup, from old Czech households.

After starting the gas station job, life was improving significantly and I stayed in the camp another 3 or 4 months before moving out. I bought a car, a very old Volkswagen with a non-synchronous transmission, even though I did not know how to drive. We pooled our money together and Jirka drove and taught me. Mr. Konir also found me a Pony II moped through a contact of his, which gave me independence for shorter trips around Vienna. On Sundays we took trips to the mountains outside of Vienna and I finally had enough money to buy clothes and see movies and such.

Since we could not freely communicate with our families in Czechoslovakia — correspondence with someone from a Western country was enough to attract the attention of the Czech secret police — we found another way. One of the Austrian workers at the gas station was a man named Martin. He was married to a Slovak woman who lived in Bratislava and he drove to Czechoslovakia once in a while to visit her. We paid him to deliver messages to our families and friends in Prague on those trips. He had a beautiful and powerful 4-door MG. When he was driving my sister somewhere in Prague one time, he had to brake suddenly and someone behind him could not stop fast enough and ran into his car. He was not happy about it.

Sometime in April, there was an older couple in the camp living in one of the separate rooms in the single story buildings. I was visiting them and they told me about a girl about my age named Alice Pelcova. They explained that she was in a difficult situation — she had been married to some Czech guy working at the Czech Embassy in Paris, and her old boyfriend from before the marriage had found out she was there and went to Paris to see her. She left her husband and came with her boyfriend to live in Vienna. The boyfriend had been her boss at a ski resort near Karlovy Vary and was 20 years older than she was. After she moved in with him he became very possessive and started beating her. She planned to leave him by emigrating to Australia and had already filled out an emigration application at the AFCR. Since I was also emigrating to Australia, the older couple wanted to introduce us so she would have some known company. They invited us both over to their room to meet. She was beautiful and I fell for her immediately.

Jirka had a wife and a young child back in Prague. She was able to get a permit to go on a CEDOK bus tour to Yugoslavia in August 1966. The secret police let her go since her young son stayed behind in Prague with her parents, so they assumed she would come back. Through Martin, we knew the places the bus tour would stop and on which days.

My cousin Tona Valach was 20 years older than me and was a doctor, an internist and cardiologist. He was also the sports doctor for the national Czech rowing team. After high school he had gotten me to join the Slavia rowing club in Prague, so we had that in common. There was a world rowing competition in Vienna at some point during my year there and Tona came with the Czech team. He did not want to meet me at the races since someone from the Czech delegation might recognize me, so I picked him up somewhere in Vienna on my moped and we went to a restaurant at the main railway station.

Bohous Fiala had gone to the same high school as me in Prague. He was one year older, very charming and athletic. He was not strong academically in math and sciences but was very good at languages. I once went hitchhiking with him and some other friends for a month through Slovakia and I tutored him in mathematics and physics along the way. We became good friends until I left for Austria. When Martin went to Prague to deliver messages, he tried to reach Bohous, but Bohous was very suspicious and would not trust Martin enough to talk to him.

I was corresponding with my good friend Pepa Brozek, who was studying at a university in the USA — his father was a professor there and a US citizen — and Pepa kept encouraging me to come to the USA instead of Australia. Around that same time it became clear that Kudibal would not be able to return to Australia. I later found out that he did go on a trip to Yugoslavia and visited the Australian Embassy there, but most likely was told exactly what the Czech speaking lady in Vienna had predicted, and he decided to stay in Czechoslovakia. That meant the whole plan we had built together — me working for his real estate agency in Melbourne and attending university part time — would not happen.