Eva Grafová

"Of course, ever since she came back, my mother had wanted to see her own mother, who was getting older and older, in London. Every year she asked for permission to go and visit her mother, alone, without her family in Prague, of course. They refused. Every year. My father kept writing letters of appeal to the Office of the President, to Tonda Zápotonda and other officials every year. I might still have those letters around somewhere. I was silly, egotistical and not understanding, but this I understood: that always at a particular time of the year my mother locked herself in a room and cried for 14 days. For 18 years, they kept refusing her permission to see her mother, and always for the same reason: it was not in the interest of the Czechoslovak Republic, Socialist or something like that, and they always added that the permission was granted only to the next of kin. I think this was too much even for the Communists. Who is closer than a mother and her child? I don´t get it. Somebody should explain this to me. In the end, she was allowed to travel in 1963. She went there and returned completely devastated, because her mother no longer recognized her. She had Alzheimer’s disease, and maybe she had recognized her somehow, but the visit turned out other than my mother had hoped for. She came back feeling totally depressed. Then, my grandmother died in 1965."

"Of course, when Munich came, the Germans took over the Sudetenland, and my mother told me about Žatec—what it had looked like there when Henlein had come to visit. She described how the people who used to greet them with respect crossed to the other side of the street. How the Žatec women knelt and kissed the ground on which Henlein walked. My grandfather was a visionary, as Jára Cimrman would say. He made business with hops, especially with foreign countries, as far as I know quite a lot with China, and put the money into London banks. So, when the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia and created the Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren, they had enough money to get out, but it was almost too late. Only thanks to the fact that the oldest sister of my mother was a doctor, as well as her husband being a personal doctor of the American Ambassador in Prague, the whole family managed to obtain American visas and leave after the 15th March—actually, not very long after that. I´d say it was some time towards the end of March. My grandfather and grandmother had left a bit earlier, and my father and mother went slightly later. In fact, they travelled by train across Germany with their American visas in the time when Czechoslovakia no longer existed. I remember my mother telling me that when they arrived (I think it was at Ostend, but I am not sure), the grandfather was waiting for them there, and when he saw them, he knelt down and kissed the ground."