Milena Kalinovská

"I think it was a complete shock to everyone. It was completely unimaginable for me, even though I was from a family that had to go through various difficult moments, but even I did not think that something so fundamental and so tragic would happen. At that time, I was just with Jirka Studnička in Austria. I remember it was morning, we were hitchhiking, someone stopped us, and when we said we were from Czechoslovakia, he told me that there were tanks. I thought, 'Who is this? Isn't he talking about World War II? Why does he burden us with tanks… ‘And he found a Czech station, and there we listened to Czech Radio say goodbye to its nation, that it is possible that there will be times when they will not be able to speak to us. That was a total, total shock! In fact, we did not know what was happening to us. This person took us home. Fortunately, he had a small factory and told us that we could stay there as long as we wanted and think about what we wanted to do. I had no connection with my family. I had no idea who he was. I just knew that my parents and my brother were on vacation in Bulgaria, and that was about it. "

"We were visited by the Russian community, probably because of my grandfather, who was recognized as a Don ataman, and there was different talk among different people as they ran away, and I listened to it all. So I remember things like riding carts pulled by horses, exploding bridges, and how some families escaped and others didn't. How did my grandmother and her future husband Fyodor Ryabov get to the Crimea and how did they get from the Crimea to Prague and what were their options. Also how my great-grandfather, who probably got somewhere completely different during the whole mess, got lost. He ended up in Zagreb, Dubrovnik, and there he got to such an important school, where he had a certain position. My grandmother's mother and her youngest brother stayed in Russia because the family was torn apart…. I perceived all this, and it was clear, my family did not have any respect for Stalin or the new communist regime, and they did not talk much about the regime in Czechoslovakia. It was perceived as it was, not spoken about. The main thing was that there was a huge respect for Czech literature in the family. "