Eda Kriseová

"There was a bus with a Czech number on St. Stephen's Square. There I asked if they were going back. And they said they were going back and that they had a lot of seats because the people who had come had emigrated and were wandering around Vienna in tracksuits. They were amazed. So I visited two more refugee camps [because] I was interested in that. There were papers where you could apply to go to South Africa, but you had to agree to apartheid. Or to Australia or to Sweden. So I was interested because I couldn't do anything anyway until I finally received a call at the post office, when I spoke to my father, who told me to come back immediately. Well, I did. And when I went across the border on that half-empty bus, the Russians had a fire and were singing at the border. When I got to Prague, I came to our street and it was barricaded. There were Russian tanks in it. And there were machine gun nests on the hillside that we were looking at from the windows. They occupied the very places that my mother-in-law remembered the Germans were dug in."

"I was about twenty-three or twenty-four at the time. A State Security man came to the editorial office of the Young World magazine. I was sitting there alone in the room and he came and showed me his ID and told me to come to Bartolomějská at two o'clock. I didn't really know what State Security was until then. I don't think any of my friends or peers had had this experience yet, or hadn't told me, because it was all very secret. So I got there at two o'clock and there was this cop waiting for me at the gate. And as we were walking up the stairs he said to me, 'I hope you don't have a program for tonight.' It was two o'clock in the afternoon. I said, 'I do. I always have an agenda.' So he says, 'Well, don't count on it. You're staying here.' And he brought me into the room where the interrogations were. It didn't look like that later on, but [at the time] there was a spotlight pointed in my face and there were two cops sitting there. The one was the one that was shouting at me and showing me their kind of tin hell. The other one was kind of nicer again and he was persuading me. The thing was that an American who called himself Ostwestman came to the Young World and I interviewed him. They sent him to me because nobody there spoke English. And the cops wanted me to steal his diary. And that I should do it for the republic."

"There is another painful point related to the farm when they started to confiscate the property of the villagers and we arrived there. We used to go there [after the war] for holidays for ten years. That was the outhouse at the farmhouse that we rented. That was two rooms. A very small house. And when we got there in about '50, there was no dog, which we loved very much. His name was Punťa and he taught my sister to walk. She was holding on to his bottom and the dog walked slowly. Because nobody had time to walk with the third child. That's where I remember the Russians came. (...) I remember how they had horses in that manor meadow. I also remember a little bit how people welcomed them. But then the dog is related to that. When they took the farm away from the farmer, the dog just wasn't there. And we were saying, 'Where's Punťa?' And he was in tears and he said he shot him because he had nothing to guard anymore, because nothing belonged to him. That Punťa, in my eyes, was the first victim of the communist regime. Then others followed."

"My grandfather picked us up and said we were going to visit a friend of his in Vinohrady, but then we went to Žofín and he changed his mind. We used to go to the Žofín a lot because we lived in the Old Town and it was close by. And it started. That was the air raid - I think it was in February in '45, like the big American air raid. There's, like, there's this community center in Žofín, and we went down into the basement and stood on these planks. There was water. The cellar was filled with water. There were barrels and there were planks on top of the barrels. And we were standing on these planks. There was a terrible bang. And it hit the house where the Dancing House is today. That was really right next door. And then they bombed the line to Vinohrady. My mother heard it on the radio and she was so scared that we were bombed at my grandfather's friend's place in Vinohrady. But we were in the cellar. But we were as close as we could get to the fallen house."

"I've done that a couple of times, I've done a big two-bag shopping and I've come in there with it and said, 'How long is this going to take?' Of course they didn't tell me that. I said, 'You know, I'm in a hurry,' and they said, what was I doing? Because the bag had, like, cabbage coming out of it. I said, 'I did the shopping. I'm not going to go [here] with emptry hands. There are shops around the corner, so I'm not going to come here for nothing.' Because they were working with fear. And if you didn't show fear, they were a bit confused and didn't know which way to go. And that's what gave me the joy, that's what gave me the strength."

“Havel then established the Civic Forum and I called him that I was available. He told me to come immediately and so I came and I have not left for two and a half years because I worked as his spokesperson in the Civic Forum. I was a actually not the spokesperson of the Civic Forum, but Havel’s spokesperson, because the members of the coordinating committee - there were about ten of us and I was actually the only woman there - they selected me and they told me: ‘Look, you are the one who has to be the spokesperson, because look at us, see how we look.’ They were all kind of unkempt with beards and long hair and they told me: ‘You need to dress up, you look civilized and you need to do the spokesperson’s work.’ Which was horrible, because I then had to literally fight the hordes of journalists from all over the world who arrived and who were really fighting for getting to Havel. I always had to call somebody so that they would help me hold the door in the Špalíček building.”

“On August 21st we were going to Nazareth by bus and our Russian guide announced to us in Russian that our country had been occupied and we thus went straight to Jerusalem and we left out Nazareth and we went to Jerusalem where we walked Via Dolorosa and I was then slamming my head against the Western Wall. What kind of life I have, that it always comes to this? Then we were sitting with Pithart in the Reuters agency the whole night where we could read telex messages and the news were horrible. I had my little child here.” – “And your husband was here?” – “My husband was here, but we did not have any contact at all, it was not possible to reach him, and the country as if ceased to exist and it simply disappeared together with the tanks. Since I was a young mother and I could speak English, journalists were keen to interview me, and they were taking me from one television station to another and to a radio station and since I was a fighter type of a person, I was even making matters worse for myself.”

“I was not allowed to publish at all, and they had not told me that. I only learnt about it when I tried it, and it was not possible at all. I was absolutely desperate, I have already read something and I just knew that the Soviet revenge was going into the following generations, and how they were punishing not only those who had committed something, but their children and grandchildren as well were actually damned. I was thus quite desperate and so I went to work as a volunteer in a mental institution and it was a mental hospital located in an old convent building and there were about five or six hundred patients. It was an institution for chronic patients and there were mostly schizophrenics and patients with manic depression who had already been there for thirty or forty years and I went there and talked to the head doctor and said that I would like to come there and help out and it was a volunteer work of course, because I had no qualification for that, and he said that it was great, because they only had two nurses per seventy patients.”