PhDr. Eva Šothová

"And it really started on December 15, when the Securitate – the secret service had the need to recall this priest and people stood up for him and then actually started the demonstrations and big strikes. Otherwise, Timisoara is a beautiful city with big boulevards and a square, so it really bordered on a rather dangerous situation there, which ended up being a tragic event, because tanks, soldiers and heavy fire were deployed, shooting from airplanes, from helicopters. There was even a story of a mother who was decorating the Christmas tree at home, because it was just before Christmas, when a ricocheted bullet basically killed her. So far, there is no exact information on how many people died. It is kept secret. To this day, it has not been investigated or specified how many people were killed in Bucharest as well."

"He (Nicola Ceaușescu, editor's note) tried to run away immediately, that is, he ran away, and tanks and armored cars were deployed immediately, and we actually saw pools of blood in front of the embassy from the window. But in my life, I will never forget how those tanks went and shot into the crowd of people and actually ran over the Dacias that were parked on the edges. That was a terrible sight. That cannot be forgotten. But still on the television, Ceaușescu escaped, and the program of celebratory songs and poems on Ceaușescu was still on the television."

"Basically, there was still shooting every night and a lot. At Christmas, there was the most shooting. I will never forget that Christmas in my life, I always cry a little, because Christmas really reminds me of an unbelievable shooting. We didn't have food, we didn't have anything, so I baked bread and the boys didn't sleep all night, because everything in that concrete city was incredibly loud. There were broken storefronts, indeed, pools of blood on the roads, on those boulevards. But in the morning the cars drove up, everything was washed, the shop windows were glazed, and at night there was shooting again, so it was difficult, and we heard the shooting because they had guns, we heard the shooting for half a year at night, at any time."

„We knew it was difficult there, so we took stock – dried soups, everything that could be dried or even from clothes, so that's how we ate. Then we sold it to these Russian students. It was such a nice experience, we lived in a room on the sixth floor and actually the whole dormitory was full of cockroaches and cockroaches. So it was full, in the evening, when we turned it off, it started to rustle and they crawled all over us, so we slept with the lights on for half a year. Well, there were also mice running around, scratching behind the radiator, so we were also thinking of everything possible to catch them. And I don't know if I can talk, we had such a tiny mouse in the toilet, very cute, so we named her Nina Pavlovna. And when we went to the toilet, we talked to Nina Pavlovna.“

"When it happened, we happened to be with our parents and we were at Domaša. The husband went to take a bath, and when he came out of the water, the sky was strangely orange, the sun was shining very brightly. We had no idea, we didn't know, because there was no information, actually the information was delayed, that it was published only a few days later, but he came out of the water and immediately blisters appeared all over his body. So we went home afterwards and we had no idea, we didn't know what it was. But only later, actually, only when we came to Romania, did we find out that in Romania all the people received either iodine injections or iodine tablets. Pregnant women were taken care of. Nothing here. I actually went to Prague, and in fact, neither pregnant women nor anyone else was taken care of in Prague."