Marie Byron

"We were crossing quite drastically, I was sent out to find them a way over the hills, literally. We took the train all the way to the border of Yugoslavia, they were worried about getting caught, they arranged a day trip so they wouldn't find out right away, that was the last day really, before they were supposed to go back. We got to the border, they were pretending to be lovers, she was pregnant, so somehow they were holding hands or sitting on a park bench, I was trying to find my way to Udine, Italy. I could see some lights, so great, that would be Italy, but it was a crossing, so I had to go back quickly when the dogs started barking too much. Then there was a river, so I had to strip completely naked to avoid getting wet, trying to see how deep the river was. Poor Alena, who gave birth in January, she was already very pregnant, it was too deep, so I gave up on that too. Eventually I did get over a pretty big hill on the Italian side, so I came back. They were all nervous waiting to see what was going on. So we made it, they, poor things, had one suitcase and it was full of photographs, nothing else. We weaved our way through those woods and came into Italy, she poor thing completely exhausted. The first train to go to Rome was due to leave at about four o'clock in the morning, fortunately they had already opened the waiting room, I went there with Alena to sit down and Vladimir was walking somewhere. Imagine, now the carabinieri came and now the documents. What were they doing in Italy at that time, they would have put these people back in Yugoslavia, it would have been found out by now that they wanted to escape and it would have been bad. The documents and the train was due in about a quarter of an hour, how to hold them up? So I got my English passport, and she was sitting next to me, exhausted, pregnant. It was two young boys and they started flirting, I was twenty-five, it's all about time, it's all about time, flirt, talk... They tried English, I tried a little Italian, so it was fun, but they still wanted the passport of this one. Please, I'm looking after her, look at her, poor thing, she's been abused. She had an apple and she knew what was going on, that it was really about the minutes until the train came. She, as she was eating the apple, she took it out of her mouth and offered it to the carabinieri, she was absolutely perfect, if she was an actress she couldn't have done better, there was spittle falling from the apple, they were running away and that's how we got saved."

"It was early September (1968), I was near Hyde Park, so I thought, people will be lying in the sun and some money will roll out. It was like that too, I'd occasionally find something, a few pennies, and I could buy a bun or an apple. And I found a silver Dunhill lighter, a very expensive brand, and a person from the Czech Republic, silver, heavy, so I had a big problem whether to go to the jewelry store with it, and then I said no no, that's not possible, so I had to find a policeman who would take me to the police station where I would turn it in. Imagine, I turned it in, I didn't have a permanent address, so I tried to explain that I was a refugee. Come back in a month, either the person will come for it, if not it will be yours or you will get something for a reward. A month later I got there and at the time I was getting three pounds a week from the lady and there was ten pounds in an envelope and a phone number that the person wanted to thank me. I didn't speak English, I wasn't going to phone somebody, hardly. Imagine, it's really such a life experience, if you read it in a book I'd say, it's imaginative. Now more than 50 years, I'm in Scotland in a café and because it was too crowded, a man came in, please don't mind if I sit down, absolutely not. I had a visitor from the Czech Republic and they were going to look at something and in an hour the tour was going to be over and they were going to call on the mobile. We started chatting and he was well-read and loved opera, so we hit it off beautifully. And then the phone rings and my friends are done. And the guy gets up and says, you know, I have a lot of respect for you as a nation. Well, I'm happy for you, for what? And I thought he was going to say, for example, Janacek ... I had this strange experience that something that was terribly important to me came back into my hands because some young girl gave what I had lost to the police. I looked at it and said, wasn't that a lighter and you didn't leave £10? He was standing there like he'd been struck by thunder, imagine, after all these years... And so he hugged me and he was crying, the man was crying, it was an unbelievable experience. After all these years we meet somewhere in Scotland and he says the last sentence to me, I appreciate the Czechs, I was so moved, you didn't even have an address. But do you know how much it helped me? That ten pounds at the time."