Eva Hejdová

"Then the next year, when I was already in high school, I was a member of an organization called the Union of Prague High School Students, and I was active directly at the headquarters. And I was also active in that school, there were strikes in the universities at that time, but there were also strikes in the high schools, so I was on that strike committee in the high school and we went to express solidarity with the students. Like, I remember I was in journalism, so I was just in this action thing and I kept believing that somehow there was going to be a continuation of what started in the spring of that '68, but unfortunately it didn't happen."

"I still remember that I was asleep and my cousin, Frida's daughter, came to wake me up. In German she was telling me, like the Russians had come to us, and I was so sleepy I didn't understand, like I was completely out of my mind. I was about 15 at the time, or maybe not even 15 yet, so we were actually facing that kind of question at the time. That was my mom, her boyfriend and I were there and we were still going on to Yugoslavia and then we were going back through that Vienna again and it was actually kind of a question of whether to stay there, yeah. My mom was thinking about it. I didn't want to at the time because I didn't believe that it would completely break down here and that it would be terrible. Then my mom also decided because of the grandfather, because my grandmother wasn't alive at that time, so there would be no one to take care of him, so we ended up going back."

"For a while I was doing something that didn't exist here at the time, and that was advertising, photographic advertising. So I remember that I took pictures of the devil's cauldron, or advertising for jewellery in Jablonex, or clothes that were made in Centrotex, but it was still in its infancy. It was strange and difficult to sort those things out financially. You couldn't do advertising without taking the pictures to something called the Fine Arts Fund. That was in the Mánes, and there were these old geezers who sat there and looked at it, and just made claims that they could somehow judge the photograph aesthetically. And they either let you go through that committee or they didn't. There were all sorts of bribery scandals, that they let somebody in because they were a friend or they gave them some money, and they didn't let somebody else in. It was a rather bizarre commission, but nevertheless, without the commission, the photographs could not be paid for."

"My father lived ten minutes from my house, just as he lived ten minutes from my house in Prague. So I went there, and because I was worried that maybe he wouldn't want to talk to me, because he never really wanted to talk to me, so I went downstairs and said the name I had, and for a while my name was Eva Krákora, because that was my husband's name. So I said that name and I lied and I said I was bringing him a letter because otherwise the doorman wouldn't let me upstairs. So the doorman let me upstairs and I actually saw my father at last after thirty-three years. But unfortunately he told me, as he was married for the third time, that this was the first and last time we would see each other, that he had colossal problems with my mother and that he didn't really want to see me. So it was kind of a pretty tragic thing for me."

"My second option was to try journalism because I was also writing. There was a requirement that a student had to have two years of work experience before applying to university. Which I actually fulfilled, because somewhere around the age of seventeen I really started working for the Young Front, first as a photographer and then I started writing little things for them as well. Actually, at the time when I applied to the school, I had excellent results from school, straight A's in my high school graduation exam, and I did very well in the entrance exams, and I had two years of work experience. It turned out that in fact, in that seventy-two year, ninety percent of the people who were admitted were people who had some communist connections. Their parents were generals, and when I went to the exams I felt like I was at a military parade, or the daughter of the editor of Květy was there, and kids like that. And plus there were about five of us, or even fewer, maybe four, who got in because we were the only ones who met this requirement that we had that experience."