Eva Jaklová

"When I came back from Germany, I got an invitation to a secret (agent). I knew it was the secret police, just because it was all secret. We went - he unlocked three doors, then locked them again from the inside. That wasn't the time of raping, it wasn't talked about yet, so I didn't even think that being locked in there, that something would happen to me as a young girl. And he asked me questions. He asked me what I was most interested in when I was crossing the border. And I said, 'You know, the thing that bothered me most was that I was alone in that carriage.' To explain - first the train went to Cheb, then they put a new locomotive there, then it was no-man's land, and then it was Germany. And so I told the policeman that I didn't like the fact that I was alone in that carriage and that I was guarded on each side by a member of my country with a Kalashnikov. And that it made me sad that such a thing would happen. And he said to me, 'Well, the women of our nation are all sorts of things too.' I just turned everything around. At that time I didn't know anything about working with State Security, I didn't even know the acronym StB at that time. So I thought I had better talk like an idiot. And I did."

"In 1967, there was a whole group of us, and so I was staring. I had a one-year-old child at the time. I knew who Havel was, I might have known who Vaculík was, I certainly knew who Jindřiška Smetanová was, but no more. There I stenographed Vaculík, also Havel and many others. It was even more training for me than my first visit to the West in 1963. I understood many things there and also that I no longer had the ability to express what freedom meant to me. Even though I was still young. But when you're not from an intellectual background where you're already automatically on a higher level, you're just discovering that. But you're discovering it too late, because the time when you're absorbing the most information has passed. Then the day-to-day worries, I don't want to say they suffocate a person, but they deprive them of their span."

"Then I remember after 1948, when we were all pioneers, that we were like poor children from the working-class neighbourhood at a congress in a palace in a park that was then called Julda Fulda [Julius Fučík's Park of Culture and Recreation]. Each child was assigned a high ranking official, and we went on stage with them. But I don't know if it was an event from the ROH (Revolutionary Trade Union Movement) or the Communist Party. We got a package there and it was the first time I ate an orange or tangerine."

"We were running from the shelter to the Balkán hill, where we were lying down and bombs were falling all around us. Our parents held our heads because the pressure waves were massive. So we survived. Then we lived for a few days in a gardening colony in Hrdlořezy at the terminus of tram [number] 21. There was a field, a cherry orchard and behind it a big gardening colony. It was perhaps sometime in February, but it was extremely warm, and we slept there for several nights. People from the houses around brought us food. That was the first and last time I saw my parents crying together. Because we had nothing. We ran away with nothing. And that's the first memory I have of my childhood."