Vlasta Kubalová

"I was still a child at that time and actually the onset of the communist regime, it's like... I guess it didn't touch me. We were children, we looked at that time as the way it was. Collectivisation started here in 1949, I was four years old, so I guess I didn't have any sense of it. But after that I could see it, because in the fifties they started to set up cooperatives here and people didn't want to leave their animals and they didn't want to join a cooperative. There was sometimes outright violence, where they would literally pull cows and horses out of the barns, out of the stables, and take them away."

"I originally wanted to do something completely different, I wanted to study law, but I didn't get in. I guess because of my background, because my dad was a businessman and I had trouble getting into high school. And because there were so few teachers at that time, they set up colleges in regional towns. So I tried there and I studied Czech and Russian. And then I waited to see what would be the next fate, because at that time there were placements."