Helga Bláhová

"I didn't understand it. Even though before, me and the girls used to come up here to the camp with a transistor radio on our ear and listen to the news about what was going on, it didn't occur to me that I would be coming home and there would be occupiers. There was an arcade in Liberec and so on. We came to the first class. The professor who had us, the ones who were there and didn't go to the hop, he told them all off for not being patriots. So I said I couldn't come early that I didn't get across the border. 'Oh well, you're good, you're good, that excuses you.' We got to the hop, it was fine. And how did it affect my classmates? Different, because I know some of them, mind you we were fifteen, some of them were even friends with the soldiers that were here."

"Both parents, of course Germans, had to learn Czech. My mother took Czech classes, and my father, because he worked in the then Kohinor factory and worked more with people, because he was a warehouse worker, learned Czech quite well. Mom worked at the machine shop, so she learned Czech more from that course. They were always arguing at home about who had the bigger vocabulary. Mum said she had the bigger vocabulary, but the truth is that dad was better at speaking because he was around people, and then Mum was retired, so she didn't come around people much."