Gabriela Ederová

"When I was twelwe and my sister was six, we decided to run away. That we would run away because we didn't want to listen to it all any more. Because there was actual violence happening. Mom would regularly grab the broom and started beating dad. And we did not want to watch. We were soulmates with my dad so I wrote a letter to him, that we would leave. That we wouldn't want to live like this any more. And dad wrote back. Whenever I was feeling really bad, I wrote a letter to my dad and he always replied. And he calmed me down and he explained me everything. That it is the way it is, that people do not have the same views. And that he would strive to avoid any sort of violence or major arguments. Truth be said, he did manage to calm mom down and it was not happening that often and we came to terms with that."

"I returned from school and mom was lying in bed, a small bottle of some such poisonous something, what was that liquid there. I was shocked - I was thirteen - I was so shocked that mom was dead! I ran to grandma's, at that time, we weren't living with them any more. Dad had, few years before, in a garden that had belonged to gradmother, built a small house. A sort of cottage but it was masonry all around so it was an actual small house. I ran to grandma's, grandma phoned dad and then they brought mom back to life somehow. They called the doctor. Then it happened again and again, not by that poison, but we found mom on the floor and we always thought that she had hurt herself. At the end, later, when we [me and my sister] got older, we realised that it was just an act. It's terrible to just think about it. She must have been so unhappy!"