Saša Uhlová

"So it [the search] is like an intrusion into a safe world, a moment in fact, which one understands even as a child, that it has no influence on him. But I think my parents managed to create a safe enough environment, including the fact that it wasn't just the nuclear family, like parents and children. I think that's important, not just for the time before, but kind of in general. I think having an extended family that's not necessarily biological, but let's say an extended circle of people that the child interacts with is important in that regard. So I knew that even if, for example, my mum got arrested and my dad was still in prison, or both of them got arrested, there were always some other people who could maybe look after us or something. I think that basically what happened was that the safety outweighed that sense of fear, that power that the family couldn't control."

"I remember my grandfather as one of the nicest people I've ever met in my life and as someone who was able to talk to people who had completely different opinions. Which was very evident after the Revolution, when my friends often held, I would say, very ideologically sharpened right-wing positions, and my grandfather was a person who was able to talk to them and look for the interesting in what they were saying. So I think there's some influence there on how I try to approach life, that my grandfather was actually terribly inspiring to me in that way."

"The police were checking everybody who went in and out, and a German journalist or a British journalist, it wasn't a Frenchman because I didn't have the language in common with him, came in and took pictures. Well, and then he was afraid they were going to take his film when he left, so he left the film there. So he came out with the camera and they gave the film to me and we had a meeting on the bridge a little bit from there. I was given the task of going to the bridge, taking the film and giving it to the man. So I went there, I gave it to the gentleman - and suddenly a car pulled up next to me and there were two gentlemen in it - and they were actually, I don't even know if they were uniformed and it was just a marked car or not, but I knew right away that it was the police. And they started asking me what I was giving the man. And I, even though I had been indoctrinated from a young age that I shouldn't interact with them at all, I couldn't keep my mouth shut and I said that nothing. And they were like, 'Don't lie to us, we saw you,' and I just kept saying nothing, and my knees were shaking. So, for example, when somebody makes some kind of statement about people who signed a cooperation or did something like under duress during an interrogation, of course, this was not an interrogation and it was a totally cool situation, and anyway the fear was like that and the nervousness that maybe I can't elevate myself above somebody who was broken in some way."

"There was already a direct train to Paris. My parents somehow arranged with the conductor that we would go there, because I was eleven and Pavel was thirteen, so we would go there alone. Right after the border, the conductor started to hand out the Svědectví. It was some kind of magazine. Suddenly, the atmosphere changed even on the train where the Czechs who were going to the West were. That's when I felt emotionally that it was different. Then we were there... we saw Pavel Tigrid and his wife. Then we stayed with some Trotskyist friends of my dad's and we were in the Alps and the Atlantic coast and Paris. We were there for a month."

"We had a big picture of my dad on the wall and we knew he was in jail. We knew he was in jail because he was brave, and we knew or knew somehow the nature of the regime we were living under. And it was talked about openly at home and among the people we associated with. So actually the only problem was when I started going to school, it wasn't really talked about there and at the same time my classmates didn't understand it at all. They didn't understand at all, like when they asked, and I said my dad was in jail, and I tried to explain to them that he wasn't a criminal, they didn't understand. And it wasn't until I got there that I understood that there were people in prison who had done something bad or something. Before that, I kind of automatically assumed that you just went there for being brave."