Hana Vondráčková

“Then there was the Velvet Revolution, and our company worked a lot for East Germany and for Russia, and suddenly there were no contracts. There was no work to do. Girls, it was terrible, I can tell you. There were two years when I was going to work and I was unhappy because I had nothing to do! There was a punch clock, and we had to be physically present there. But we had nothing to do, and I was solving crossword puzzles and reading and nobody scolded me for that, because this was a hard blow for everybody. From the full activity we suddenly went to a state when there was no work to do.”

“I remember that during the air raids we had to run to the basement to hide, and I kept a shoebox next my bed and I had my doll there. My mom would thus always grab me, I would grab the doll and we would run down to the basement. There were about five apartments with families... Dad constructed a kind of a frame in the basement, and they placed blankets and duvets over it, and my parents slept there. For me, they tied two wicker armchairs together, and I fit in there just fine, and I slept in those armchairs. We cooked in the basement, too, and we simply lived there… The only thing we heard in the basement – I don’t know if you even know what a basement looks like – there was a small sliding window from the sidewalk used for supplying coal. When they delivered coal they threw it in there through that opening. We could hear the heavy armoured boots of German soldiers just a few metres away from us. They could have just opened the window, thrown something in there, and perhaps I would not have even been telling this to you today.”