Marie Kyselová

"Suddenly a guy appeared, well as I say, we didn't know each other there, maybe a couple of them knew…the family knew each other, but as strangers we didn't know anyone. Well, they actually started there…the guy had a briefcase, and he took out two bottles and threw them over the fence and when they hit the ground they started to burn. And then probably the riot police came out of the side streets. Well, because they had shields, they had helmets, and they were clearing the place. Well, and I, when I realized and I remembered that I had mum and a child back home, born in '64 in July, and this was in '68 in August, so about four years old. At the station, thank God, I caught the last train that was released to Czechoslovakia. I was at the station in Pardubice at five o'clock in the morning."

"As I moved from the Pardubice City Construction Company to the district national committee after my maternity leave, so the construction company was a kind of 'family business' where mostly all people were former trades people. The people who worked there might be in the Communist Party, I don't know, I never was, but they certainly didn't take it that seriously. And when I moved over to the district office, I was used to being addressed as 'Hello' and 'Mr./Mrs.', but I got a message from the secretary at the time that at the district national committee we greeted each other: 'Čest práci' [Honour the labour] and we addressed each other: ‚Soudruhu‘ a ‚Soudružko‘ [male and female equivalents of Comrade, trans.]."

"They simply told my father there that after finishing grammar school I was not eligible, being from Schmoranz family. Although maybe it wasn't so much because of the reasons, for example, that I was from a trade family, but there was also the fact that Schmoranzová from Slatiňany was not eligible, because there was some personal interest of the Minister of Education, Zdeněk Nejedlý, who had been in contact with Gustav Schmoranz [my father's uncle and guardian]. He was a director in the National Theatre in those days, in fact in the days of Zdeněk Nejedlý's studies. So he [Zdeněk Nejedlý], by and large, was somehow personally interested in the Schmoranz family, so that they couldn't study any more, the Schmoranzes from Slatiňany. Well, my father explained it to me at the time, he said: 'You know, girl, there's all kinds of stuff going on in the matter and there could be this or that, and look, mum´s getting on,' - mum was born in 1906, wasn't she - 'so mum's getting on, I could finish here any time, and mum probably wouldn´t manage it if she had to support you at university somewhere. ' Otherwise, before this, I had been prepared all the time to carry on the family tradition of studying architecture, right. Construction. Well, by that time I was, what, seventeen, there were already some boyfriends, I mean, I'd had a student love since I was fifteen. Well, I got over it pretty well. For me, this kind of bad attitude towards the adversities here was significant more after 1968."

"When there was currency reform, which I didn't understand either, my impression was that it was going to be easier to count, so [dad] earned a thousand crowns. As I was just saying I would have loved to go to one of those summer camps that my classmates used to go to, right. So I was allowed to apply, but I got a bill and the price was 999 for the three-week camp. And my dad, who before, I mean, before the currency reform, had had a salary of 5,000 a month, after the currency was changed, it was recalculated 1:5, he had 1,000 crowns. So my parents explained to me that it was not possible for them to pay 999 crowns for my three-week camp out of the salary, because we had to live on something. And that was the first realization that I had in relation to the right approach to all people that was being promoted at that time. That all people were equal and so on."

"I didn't have such bad direct experience as a child, because my parents simply protected me from all that, I know more about it by hearing what was going on. As a kind of an unforgettable experience it remained in me that we were returning from my grandmother's, where I was hidden with my mother, from Zaječice, and we actually got into the stream of refugees from the East who were fleeing away from the Red Army."

"Dad, he was a son of Jan Schmoranz, one of the sons of the old František Schmoranz Sr., and dad was born in 1896. He also ended up growing up in an incomplete family there, because his father Jan Schmoranz, among other things being a fire brigade chief, caught a cold while putting out a fire. As he had diabetes, for which at that time there was no medication, it was only kept under control by a diet, so then during putting out the fire, he developed severe pneumonia and died."