Natália Hejková

“I remember the 1968 perfectly clearly, those are such times when one lives the history and it stays fixed in the mememory. I still remember how they shot Kennedy, I also remember how they announced it, or I remember when Gagarin flew to space and our neighbour called, “A guy flew into space!” And I asked, “What is space?” So, this is the way I remember the 1968. My dad, I think it was such a moment when he felt that something could change, a different era would come. Because, the family still felt that they ran away from Communism after the October revolution in Russia and they came to Czechoslovakia where the same thing started in 1948. He felt that something new and different could begin.”

„Apparently, basketball was meant to be. I tried all the sports, really, from playing football to, I don’t know, diving, yes, I did diving, too. But I left this one quickly, once, I had a bad dive, I messed up a somersault and I discovered that if one hits water badly, it hurts badly. And when I was fourteen, a friend of mine said that she started doing basketball and obviously, I wanted to try it as well. Sport, that was for sure, it was a given, and then it became clear that it would be games. At the time when I was deciding for basketball, I was playing tennis, not too well but I played, and games, it means that there’s someone playing against you and you need to win over them. And that was what I liked for sure. Basketball won over tennis probably for the reason that it included a group of people who would enrich your life. You can be friends with them, probably, or you can manipulate them, but it doesn’t matter, it was more fun than being on one’s own. Moreover, basketball is a sport where you don’t need to be in a top physical condition, I think, that when you’re not inn top form, you can use your head. It’s a game and you can mislead some, win over them by outsmarting them, inventing something they do not expect. That was probably the thing that ended up attracting me to basketball.”

„The most interesting story is that of my great-aunt who ended up living in Prague. I and my sister considered her our grandma because we had none other. She escaped through a fictional marriage with some Romanian and through Romania, she got to Prague in some steerage. So this our great-aunt, we called her grannie, or, alternately, grannie Nata, to differentiate, got to Prague this way and I’m named after her so I’m Natalia. Maybe I inherited a bit of her bellicose character. She not only moved to Prague where she got married, she married a Russian emigre again, she was called an ‘aventuriste’ by her family, she was the youngest of those six sisters and when she was seventeen, she left the family house and went to work as a nurse for the White soldiers in the civil war after the Revolution (of 1917) and she ended up losing an eye in the civil war. So, she only had one eye but she was still optimistic and tough. And it showed when we played cards when I was a child. It usually ended up with both of us crying, she cried, I cried because we had argued that she is cheating and she took offense that she cannot be cheating, no way, that she doesn’t see because she only has ne eye. My mom always came to calm us down and she would say “Let it be, let her have her way, she is an old person.” And I said to mom “Let her have her own way, she’s a child.” It was interesting indeed. And she did not end up only with the White Army but during the Prague Uprising [of 1945], she was obviously one of the first people who went to the barricades, along with her husband, although it can’t be really said that she’d carry the standard first, but her husband was an engineer, not sure what was his field of expertise, and they summoned him, there was a gossip going around that the Prague Castle is all… so he went to do some research whether it’s true or not, one has to survey it. And at that occasion, they ended up on the barricades and he fell and she was seriously injured but she survived. They were hit by a grenade.”