Mgr. Jana Marková

"When the revolution started, I happened to be in Prague on a tour. We were at the House of Culture and Recreation, I think it was called something like that. It was such a huge building. There we waited for a theatrical performance. The actors were coming in, they had wax coats on, and now they were telling each other that they had to leave the demonstration because they had a performance. They were telling us what it was like, and we sat there and watched, all of us completely flabbergasted. This was a tour from the school or the organization that was putting it on for the school, so it was all teachers. We were all kind of freaked out, scared. That was on the 17th of November. Then when we drove through Prague, there were some armoured personnel carriers. But we didn't know what was going on, which was beating, of course. We persuaded the leader of our expedition to take us to Vyšehrad [Albertov] to see where it came from. She absolutely did not agree. At school we started listening to television. Then the TV started broadcasting it, I don't know, from about Thursday the demonstrations were already broadcast. My son was in college, so he was on the phone telling us what was going on. I was so worried about him. Luckily he wasn't at the demonstration because he was meeting a girlfriend. So we gradually learned what was going on. We also listened to it from Free Europe and we were overjoyed. When I called my parents, my mother said, 'We're sitting here with my dad in front of the TV and we're crying all the time because it's so beautiful on color TV.' It really was one of the greatest experiences of my life that we lived to see it and that our children lived to see it."

"Apart from being unhappy, we thought a lot about emigrating. My dad was working in Austria at the time, working for the Fest company, which had some contacts here with Bupak in Budějovice, which was a branch of the Windmill paper mills. So he had a job in Austria. My mother would have got the job easily because she knew German. At that time Switzerland was also taking, they were open countries that normally didn't allow emigrants across their borders. So there was a lot of talk about emigrating, a lot of talk about leaving. But I got married at that time and I had a son. My parents couldn't accept not seeing their grandson grow up. I didn't want to leave because I was newly married, I was looking forward to going into teaching. I couldn't imagine it, I didn't speak German. I couldn't imagine myself fitting in anywhere in that society. My dad said to me, "Homesickness is terrible. We experienced that in the Reich. You get used to all the advantages. You get used to being better off, being able to travel. You get used to it all, it feels normal. But homesickness will follow you.´ I think that influenced me a lot, that I didn't want to. My parents thought at first that my sister and I would go, and then they changed their minds and stayed here."

"You have moments in life that you will never forget for the rest of your life. Privately, such moments include, for example, the birth of children or the passing of loved ones, but the 21st August 1968 and the Velvet Revolution were also among such moments. I can remember that exactly. My mother woke me up in the morning, the radio was on in the kitchen. They were playing Beethoven's Fate. In between, there were calls about what was going on, what had happened. That was really hard. We were students then, so we were involved in all sorts of things. We redesigned signs, brought food to the radio station, and we still thought it was only temporary. It wasn't temporary."