He was sent to make a film about this construction of the road to Tibet, and it was just him and the cameraman. So you had two 25 year-old guys with 35 millimeters. It was incredible, because they had these heavy, heavy cameras, and crates full of film.
But I didn’t know any of that. I was little. I knew my father left and he told my mother he would be back for Christmas
When I was little, I thought he left for many, many years. But then looking at his diaries, he left for 19 months. But at that time I was four and by the time he came back, because he’d spent two Christmases, I went to school. So lots of things changed and it was never the same.
And he came back, and he couldn’t really talk about what he had seen because he was supposed to talk about things like the working class in China. So that whole thing about Tibetan Buddhism and Dalai Lama and all that was not appreciated, so the only person he could talk to was me. And also he wanted to reestablish our relationship. So he would tell me about this country called Tibet. And I thought it was a fairy tale. He told me about this guy all in gold who was Dalai Lama, who was 19.
So then it was amazing. When I did the book I actually presented the first copy to Dalai Lama, who I met and gave him the scarf he gave to my father 45 years before that when he was 19. So in a way it was a full circle, because the whole family then lived from these stories my father was telling about Tibet. He was the first person from Prague who went to Tibet, so he became like a celebrity who was in Tibet.
