Jaromíra Jankovská

"My mum and dad were like, 'Just don't get involved in anything!' when I started in Prague in September. Well, the first thing was that I got on the strike committee. That's how we started school with the class teacher. The trouble of it, because there were more of them. Although it started to turn right away, by Christmas it was all hushed up, it wasn't allowed, it stopped being talked about. I don't know more or less, there was no bad mark for behaviour because of that, but then it died down. Everybody, even the professors weren't allowed to speak anymore if they wanted to continue teaching. So then we went through that school in such a way that there were boundaries, you weren't allowed there, you weren't allowed to say that, it was written here what you could say."

"As far back as I can remember, we had a cow and a calf, and when the normalization [collectivization] came after 1953, it was different in the villages then, that they were taking away from those farmers, so they took away... they just came and [people] had to hand over a tractor, a thresher, just whatever they had in agriculture that they needed. Then they also took the cattle away, so they took our calf first, so we were crying. Then the cow, I remember I used to go to my grandmother when she was milking, with a tin can to get milk. I remember that, I cried about that too. And it was so hard for those people because they actually had those animals as family members."