Milena Janda

"Time went on and in 1989 the situation in Bohemia changed, and the National Socialist Party in Exile, whose chairman was my father, decided to have a Congress in Prague. My parents were enthusiastic about going to Prague. My brother took some free time, I did too, and we all went to Prague to accompany our parents as they were to some extent frail at the time. In Prague, first we took part in the Congress and during that time we received an invitation from Václav Havel to come to the Castle. This was, of course, a great honour for us, as, naturally, we had seen his plays translated by Markéta Goetz here in English. So we were familiar with his work but to meet him as a person was really great. By the way, my mother and his mother, as young girls, were in the same boarding school in Brno and what was interesting was that he had known about it. So, we came to the Castle and had a wonderful conversation with him and what impressed me a lot was that he always closed his eyes when talking and pronounced a sentence that was so perfect that it could have been written down straight away. My brother and I had a feeling then that we were part of a play. That what he said was…that in some way he directed us towards a certain point of the conversation, exactly as he wanted. And we were told that in some two days my father would receive the Order of the White Lion as this Order was given to foreigners. At that time all the orders were so desecrated by the Communist ideology that the Order of the White Lion was the only Order he wanted to give my father when it was found out that my father had Canadian citizenship and therefore was eligible for it. And so we went there second time. My father was given the Order of the White Lion and it was very beautiful. Then, I myself had the honour to meet him at the celebration, if this is the right word, of the 50th anniversary of Milada Horaková´s execution, when he, with his wife, came to Vyšehrad to take part in the so-called ecumenical celebration of this wonderful Czech woman. I also gave him a book written up by Mr Doležal on the basis of sources we had given him. My father had written an extremely wide personal account of his memories. This comprised 4 600 pages. We were aware of the fact that in this way it could not be published. My mother and I shortened it to 780 pages but this was still too long. Prof. Doležal shortened it even further to, I think, 220 pages. Unfortunately, the book, in many ways great, does not follow all the aspects so that later on other books and essays were published completing the picture. And there is the latest book by Jan Drábek which deals much more with what happened in Canada than the original book by Mr Doležal called Vysoká hra."