Wendy Luers

„When we arrived here in 1983 in a dark December afternoon, I had never been here before. My daughters were 11 and 13, or 9 and 11 at that point, and we arrived from New York to Frankfurt to change planes with two dogs except the dogs didn´t arrive. So I had two weeping daughters who didn´t want to go until the dogs arrived and they knew they were coming on a later plane. But the communist people were waiting at the airport, at Ruzyně airport, to greet the new American ambassador. So after we checked out the glistening vererinary hospital in the basement of the Frankfurt airport and the girls have decided the dogs would be OK, we got on the plane and came to Prague. It was dark, it was dirty, it was grim. As we came down Leninova street, now Evropská, and we got to this beautiful Petschek palace and crunched up the drive way and there were all the staff lined up waiting to greet us and I thought: ´Well, maybe this is not gonna be so bad.´ That´s how we arrived.“

„As you can imagine, I am probably not a typical spouse of an American ambassador or any ambassador, really. I don´t play bridge, I don´t do a lot of those things that a lot of ladies do. Along with Bill, our main goal was of course to do cultural diplomacy which is what we have done in Venezuela as well. Even though the StB and the communist government knew that I was a journalist and that I worked for Amnesty International, they were still so chauvinistic that they sort of put the third grade StB agents following me as opposed to the number unos who were following Bill or driving him, actually. So I went out and met some of the people that Michael Žantovský introduced us to, and I asked them again if we would get them in too much trouble. That's when they said: ´We´re in such trouble already and you´ve got whisky and you´ve got cigarettes.´ And we filled the house with these wonderfull people who were the far the most interesting people in Prague, and at the same time we did what we had to do officially.“

„As Bill said earlier, this was a life-changing experience for us because we could bring these famous American writers and painters and everybody. I was just talking actually to somebody yesterday about the fact that when John Updike came, we would always have them either go to the Čapek bookstore where they would sign the walls and people would come with their string bags with their precious volumes of the novels by Bill Styron or Kurt Vonnegut or wohomever it was, and get these people to sign it. With Updike, we invited Antonín Přidal from Brno, who had been his translator, and Přidal was so nervous about meeting his hero, that he had translated, that he was just dripping in sweat. John actually signed books in the American embassy, inside that tunnel as you walk in, and StB were across the street fotographing every single person who came in and nobody cared, they still stood there with their bags and they waited for hours to meet these American authors.“