"Well, if anyone wants to see what it would look like in our country, they should go to Cuba. Because I was in Cuba for three weeks and I thought, 'Oh, this is socialist welfare. This is what we would have been like if it hadn't been the '80s.' It's decaying there, and it's just a society that's very much like the time we lived in. Of course, the country is much poorer. Those are the socialist open-air museums I would send anyone to go and see what it's like when it's totalitarian, when you're not allowed to think anything differently than what someone (the party and the government) tells you to think. If he agrees with that, he'll have a good time. If he doesn't agree with it, he won't have a good time. I wouldn't want to live in that then. I would very much caution against allowing these tendencies to prevail in society, because it will do no good. Maybe I would consider emigrating again."
"I remember Dienstbier cutting barbed wire in Šumava on 10 December 1989. And we used to go because my husband worked at Metrostav and they had a recreation centre at Špičák in Šumava. And we could see across the valley from that dining room to Großer Arber, to Velký Javor, Germany. Down below Špičák was the border in Železná Ruda. And we saw these German skiers going down those lighted slopes in the evening, and we said, 'This is such paralysis. They're behind the barbed wire, we can see them, but we can't go there.' It was like in an aquarium. That was always this crazy symbol of the Iron Curtain for us. As soon as the wires were cut, my husband said, 'And we're going to Velký Javor.' So that same December, we went to Velký Javor as a family, because it felt like the Iron Curtain had finally fallen."
"I gave the boys a suitcase to take to my dad's house and that I was staying there. I gave them the stuff to give him and they were all stoned out of their minds. They said, 'Well, you know what's going to happen to us, it's going to be a disaster for us,' and I said, 'I know, but I just didn't want to tell you at the beginning, so I'm telling you now, I'm not coming back with you.' So they left, they left me there. And I was really determined to wait for my boyfriend, and I stayed there for a fortnight. I'd basically already made arrangements with my uncle, but that's when I called my dad from him and told him what happened, 'Dad, I'm not coming back, I didn't want to tell you. I'll stay here and wait for Ivan to come. I'm just not coming back to the Czech Republic.' As I was saying here that dad was always such a person I respected, I was very surprised by his reaction. He was actually anti-regime himself, but he started to persuade me to come back, and he said, 'You realize how many people you're going to cause problems for here, your brother won't be able to finish his studies.' I don't know what the reason was, I guess he was scared and he told my uncle, or his cousin, to send me back."
"I got off at that airport and all of a sudden it was like a slap in the face, it suddenly dawned on me what I was getting back into again. And I was so depressed afterwards. I was walking around that Prague afterwards and I was like, there's no way I'm going back. It was just from the free country to the unfree country again. And I remember that a friend arranged for me to go to the so-called MBT in Sweden - the International Builders Camp. And at that time the bank didn't allow me to do that and said that I was a potential emigrant and I didn't even get an endorsement, nothing, nothing at all. And so my only way was just to get married and have kids and run away on maternity leave and survive. Somehow I just had to accept that and you know I wondered if I had been tough and stayed there, how would my life have turned out, would it have been better or worse, but that's a if and how."
"We still went to them in '69 at the invitation of this Giovanna we met in that Romania in '68. That was the first time I saw a Western mall and I got a fever all over. And this Giovanna, when she saw me at 15, 16, I was out of my mind, she gave me some of her stuff. So that's the kind of experience for me that I still remember to this day. But mainly she offered us at that time, if we wanted to stay there, that she would get my dad a job, my mom a job. She just counted on it as a done deal that we would stay there. And I remember we sat on the bench all day and weighed the pros and cons. And my mom at the end, because of the fact that her parents were here, and that there would be no one to take care of them because her sister had died, so we didn't know how it was going to work out and if the boundaries... It was still going to work out for now, so we didn't think about it. And my parents then decided that we would go back then."
Lenka Nováková was born on 20 June 1953 in Ostrava. Her parents, Svatava and Ivan Novotný were both working in a hospital at the time, her mother as a clerk and her father as a lawyer. She grew up in the Ostrava region, with her family going on summer trips to Eastern Bloc countries. In the summer of 1968 they were able to travel to Vienna for a few days. They returned home on the night of August 20-21. A year later they were in Italy staying with friends and wondering whether they should stay there permanently. In the end, however, they decided to return home. In 1972, she passed her high school diploma and subsequently studied economics in Ostrava. At the end of her studies she received a scholarship from the State Bank of Czechoslovakia and after graduation she joined its Ostrava branch. In 1978 she accepted an offer to move to Prague. Later she managed to get an exit permit for 14 days to the West. During her travels she visited her uncle who had emigrated to the Netherlands years before and wanted to stay with him permanently. She eventually abandoned this plan and returned to Czechoslovakia. In 1980 she married Jiří Novák and started a family with him. In Prague, she became involved in various cultural associations that were inconvenient to the regime (for example, the Jazz Section). During the Velvet Revolution in 1989 she was involved in the events of the Velvet Revolution by participating in demonstrations, distributing leaflets and calling friends to inform them about the events in Prague. In 2023 she lived in Prague, where she taught at the university.
