Eva Bártová

“As my mom died when I was only three years old, me and my father, we could never travel to see his sister together, the other always stayed here as a hostage, so it would be me and my grandmother and then again at most once every two years, it wasn't possible every year, so we never spent any vacation together, or in fact my school holidays.”

"When the Second World War broke out, because my grandfather, his father, was an ardent Masaryk and a member of Sokol, it was assumed that, of course, that my father would volunteer for England in the Czech Air Force. Well, our family didn't talk about it much at home, because back in the 1950s there was not much speech freedom, so these are the kind of scraps that I sometimes learned by chance, that, for example, my father applied as a recruit when he was seventeen, but it wasn't possible because he wasn't of legal age, so they had to wait a year, and when they flew for him, they simply had to go back because the Germans were shelling them, so it only worked out the second time. And then he once told me that when they landed at that airport, when he got off, the lawn was all covered with four-leaf clovers."