"So I went there [to Volgograd], I thought I would see what it was like there. My dad didn't want to let me go, but then he said - well, okay, go and then we'll talk. And it was terrible: we stayed in an old dormitory with "tarakans" - with cockroaches, they fell from the wall onto our bed. When we were making tea and reached into the box, there was a cockroach. We had to cook for ourselves, but we couldn't get anything in the shops, we were living miserably. The students in the rooms started the morning by singing the Internationale and washed it down with a glass of vodka, and they went to school a bit drunk, and when it was minus 40 degrees, they all fell down on the way because the road was an ice rink... Madness. In the morning, black cars would drive around and pick up the people who got drunk and froze to death in the night. Some couldn't stand it and came back. Those of us who stayed agreed that we hadn´t expected it to be so bad, and that was the first thing I told my dad."
"We had an old Octavia car, my dad loaded up our stuff and we went to Yugoslavia. When we were coming back, we heard (there were no cell phones, but from people who came, sometimes we called home from the landline) that it was over, that the Russians had arrived. My parents wanted to stay there, we were in the camp the Yugoslavs had prepared for us, they let us stay in campsites for free. In return for leaving us there for three extra Sundays, we, the youth, helped in the construction of the highway. We didn't know what was going on, for example there were rumours that they were separating men and women at the border. My parents said that we would go to Austria and not come back to Czechoslovakia. But my sister and I didn't want to, because we had friends and grandparents in Czechia. So in the end we didn't stay and went home. When we were coming back across the border, we were already meeting Russian tanks and it was so crazy."
Eva Černíková (1950) comes from the Černý and Švehla family from Hostivař, her great-uncle was Antonín Švehla - the Prime Minister and Chairman of the Agrarian Party during the First Republic. She was born on 18 November 1950, her father Václav Černý was a descendant of Hostivař landowners (born 1923), her mother Jiřina Svobodová was the daughter of a carpenter from Hostivař. Eva grew up on the Černý farm at 54/46 K Horkám Street, which was adjacent to the farm of Prime Minister Antonín Švehla. During the 1950s, both farms were confiscated and became part of the State Farm Prague, her father became an ordinary employee, and her uncle Antonín Švehla the younger was sentenced to eleven years in prison in a staged trial with kulaks. Eva Černíková‘s family was monitored by State Security, and after the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops they could have stayed in Austria, but returned. Eva Černíková had problems at school because of her background, she was humiliated by her teacher and classmates. Despite all this, she later successfully graduated from grammar school (1969) and was admitted to the Faculty of Education of the Charles University in 1971 on condition that she add Russian to her English. In the 1970s she married translator Zbyněk Černík, a cousin of the singer-songwriter and dissident Sváťa Karásek. She was involved in the protests during the Velvet Revolution, and since the 1990s she has been trying to get her family farm in Hostivař back in restitution. She was living and farming there in 2024 - at the time of the interview for Memory of Nations.
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