Eva Horová

"And the farewell when we said goodbye to my parents in Jindřišská and went to Wilson station. My mother was looking out from the window at us, we lived on the second floor, and my mother said: 'The children will not be Czechs! Peta will not be Czech!' And I: 'He will and He will!' We remained a Czech family. Czech is spoken at home, both children speak Czech. Our son earns a living by interpreting, translating, as a court interpreter from Czech to Dutch. And our grandson, his son, is now in Prague and learning Czech. When I visit my mother at the Olšany Cemetery, I say to her: 'Mom, you have Czech grandchildren.'"

"We didn't see anything in Dobrín, that's a small village near Roudnice, and Jirka said: 'We're going to Prague and we leave the country!' Because he had Moscow in his head in 1964. That was his experience. I sat by the radio and cried and cried because I thought that the world couldn't let it happen. The world can't let it happen, that tanks will come to a country that did not do anything to anyone. And no one says anything, no one helps us. That was terrible helplessness. So, we went to Prague. We never had passports because we were unreliable, so we couldn't go abroad. I still don't know how my husband managed it. He left, came back and had passports and exit clauses. [...] We said goodbye to my parents, took the child, a baby buggy, two suitcases and took the train to Linz. We went through Růžová street from Jindřišská street to Wilson railway station and we went to Linz. And we became refugees.'

"Right after the war in 1945, they appointed a national administrator in my grandfather's company, who wasted all the money that my grandfather had in the company. In 1948, the Revolutionary Guards [meaning the People's Militia] came and put people in front of the gates. Our family also had a house there, and my grandfather and grandmothers lived there. And move out, until tomorrow! Everybody. It's all our now. My mom asked, she planted roses in the garden, if she could take them. They told her: 'The roses are yours, but the soil is ours and you must not step on it!' I got that from my mother. She kept diaries, I have cupboards full of my mother's diaries. And now there were us: great-grandmother, grandmother, grandfather, mother, father, me and my brother. Seven. And we needed somewhere to live. They found us an apartment in Jindřišská street right next to the tower on the second floor, and we all moved and lived there."