Jana Kaněrová

"Once, my mother and I went by bus - and the bus went through the so-called excise duty in Ďáblice. It was a customs station - a house called excise. There, the officials checked people returning from the countryside to see if they were bringing any goods, such as eggs or meat from the slaughterhouse. People were always afraid that they would search them. They used to do something similar during normalization - when we went abroad, we were always searched at the border. At that time, I was six, seven or eight years old, and we were on that bus. It was full. People were standing. My mother and I were sitting down, and a German woman was standing above us, peeling an orange. Back then, we didn't have any of that - we didn't have southern fruits, chocolates, or anything. When she started peeling it, it smelled all over the bus, and I begged my mother to ask the lady to give me a piece of the orange. My mother was a foreign language correspondent, she knew perfect German, so she asked the German lady. The German woman turned to me and said, 'For a Slavic pig, the peel is enough.' They undervalued us, the children, saying we were Slavic pigs."

"We sang at the Red Cross celebration. It had nothing to do with the Communist Party, but everything was controlled by the Communist staff. It was held in the hotel, where there was also a stage and where they invited us to sing as a thank you - that they also sometimes give blood and the nurses take care of people when needed. However, they organized it as a dining hall. We had prepared a short program with about four songs. We started singing, and the waiter started carrying the schnitzels. After one song, I turned around and saw people having schnitzels with potato salad on the table - and we were supposed to keep singing. So I got angry and said, 'Comrades, either you will eat schnitzels and we will wait behind the curtain, or we will sing, and you will eat the schnitzels afterwards. This is inappropriate.' Everyone fell silent. They put the cutlery on the table, we sang, and then they ate the schnitzels. I didn't give in, you know, in this, because it was also educational for the students. After all, we're not going to sing while people eat."

"We were afraid to even go from Poštorný to Břeclav. It was about a kilometre and two hundred meters far, that was the distance, but we still went there to shop because there weren't that many shops in Poštorná. I once went to Břeclav with my little one-year-old son in a pram and it was terribly uncomfortable. I was scared because military cars were driving towards me and aiming at me with those submachine guns. So I held the pram convulsively and wondered if they would shoot. By chance, they didn't shoot. But I felt very uncomfortable because we had heard from the radio that they had shot civilians too."