Dagmar Strnadová

"In 1986, during the time of deep totalitarianism, I came to the United States to visit my relatives. And I actually found myself in a completely different country, where people treated each other decently, nobody had to be afraid to say what they thought, there was complete freedom. And when I came back after a month, I could see from the plane how grey the Czech country was behind the border. How closed we were behind those wires. Here we still saw Germany, the colours, the beautiful landscape, and here it was greyness, nothing. We arrived at the airport in Ruzyně, and there again it was grey, dirty, unpleasant people, police, customs officers treated you as if you were the biggest criminal because you were coming back from America. I was completely depressed at first. Then when the '89 happened, the Velvet Revolution, November 17, it was a challenge for me. Now everything has to change."

"I come from a Czech family, which has a strange fate, because my parents, grandparents and their parents had to leave for what is now Poland, which was then Prussia, because of their faith. And because they were Protestants, and the Czech lands were purely Catholic at that time, and the Protestants were persecuted, so they actually went to what was then Germany in the seventeenth century, because Frederick the Great offered them religious freedom. So they left, they founded Czech villages there, my parents were born in Husinec - named after the master Jan Hus, a Czech village. And all those centuries they kept their faith there and it was tradition that the seventh generation would return to Bohemia. So my parents actually had German citizenship, they were originally Czechs who lived for several centuries with their ancestors in another country and only after World War II did they return to Bohemia. And I was born here."