"But during the period when Dubček made the Prague Spring possible, there was incredible optimism in the Czech community here in Australia that Czechoslovakia could become a democracy again. And then in 1968, after the Russian invasion, my parents went from that hope to a sense of despair and I remember my mother telling me that the despair in Prague at that time was so great that the Czechs wanted to commit suicide and that the whole Czech nation was on the verge of suicide because of what had happened with Dubček. I was eighteen years old at the time, in 1968, and I took those feelings literally. I was terrified that the population of Czechoslovakia was sacrificing itself, we heard all kinds of stories, but I had nightmares, I was afraid I would wake up and find out that my family in Czechoslovakia had committed suicide."
"In Australia we had the Sokol and I think it was a national organisation, like the Boy Scouts or something, where especially young people but also adults went to the gym. We had this organisation in Sydney at Fourth High School, which was an elite school near the harbour which had a wonderful view of the observatory and the harbour, and we went there every Friday night. My parents would take us there and meet the Czech community there, while they taught us kids gymnastics. And they taught us to sing some Czech songs. The classes started with us marching around the gym and singing Czech national songs, which we didn't like that much, but the gymnastics was great fun because we loved gymnastics. I think it was the Czech national sport at the time, but nobody knew much about it in Australia, apart from the Olympics. And the Czechs were winning gold medals in those, so we were well aware that gymnastics was a very selective, prestigious sport."
"As I understood it, [my father] changed into civilian clothes and left with the visitors, quickly disappeared down the street and escaped the guards, and then my family took him in on Žitná street. And I think Karel, his friend, who looked a lot like my father, exchanged documents with him and gave him his identity card and his ration cards. And Karel, I think, was a poet at the time."
Barbara Chobocky, married Kmenta, was born on 9 December 1950 in Zurich to her mother Maria, née Machka, and father Jan Chobocky. The latter was of Jewish descent from his father and received legal permission to travel to Israel in 1948, but in Switzerland they decided to head to Australia. Her mother joined her husband after living in Zurich for two years. In Sydney, the family interacted with the Czechoslovak community, especially through Sokol. The father was engaged in business, the mother took care of the four children who were born within five years, but she bore the isolation and conflicts with her father with difficulty. The father died of a heart attack and shortly afterwards, in 1975, the mother committed suicide. Barbara Chobocky was beginning her studies at the Film and Television School at the time, which sent her to Vienna for an internship. From there she went by train to Prague to visit relatives she had not known until then. She found material for her later work as a documentary filmmaker: her mother’s letters and the films her father had made in Sydney in the 1950s. She returned to Prague in early 1990 for ten months to complete a film about her family. In 2004, she married economist Jan Kmenta. By 2023, the witness was living in Australia and visiting Prague.
