"I spent it crying because I would have liked to stay there [in England]. Even as a Slav girl - not Slovak, but Czech girls are pretty, right. They're, like... they've got rounded shapes, kind of a round face, they're not rough. At least they weren't, what I see and hear now, I'm unhappy about. But they used to be so cute, they sang, I played piano everywhere and that stuff, no problem. I would have had a wonderful start there. But my mother never called back to me, I didn't have a single connection to my mother. And the fact of the matter is, whatever my mother was like, I'm rethinking it today as selfishness. Well, selfish, because I was the only child who could have had a better life than her. And I was educated, I had studied Charles University, that was some work!"
"My father was very strict. This strictness was reason of the fact that I never lied as a matter of principle. If I wanted to say something that wasn't true, I would get a beating. This strictness then meant that I would do my written work very nicely. My father knew several types of decorative writing, even calligraphic writing, and was very talented when it came to painting pictures, but more so working with ink. And my teacher in the third class, her name was Vera Liehmannová, later, each time we met when I was already a teacher and we were at school together, she would always say to me: 'Alenka, I still have your notebooks hidden as an example of how well a child in the third class is able to write.'"
"Well, suddenly the door opened the morning of 21 August, Ota, who had been out of the republic for 27 years, opened it and said, 'Alena, the Russians are at us!' And I asked him what he meant, how at us? 'Well, in the republic, in the Czechoslovak Republic!' 'How - the Russians?' 'Well, in the morning the planes flew in and occupied, we're going to be occupied by the Russians!' And I wasn't at home at the time, I was in England. And now it's all got complicated. I could fly out, I think the ticket was valid for about 14 days. And I had 14 days to be spending every evening in tears."
"The normalization, it was when Husák came in [office]. He was probably quite clever, but otherwise unbearable. The most horrible thing was always to watch him at Christmas, behind those thick glasses that looked like the bottom of a beer bottle, rolling his eyes from left to right. And he would wish us in Slovak, which I otherwise loved and read, but it was something terrible from him. And he wished us a happy new year. So we were all - whether we knew each other or not - desperate."
Alena Olšanská was born on 23 February 1943 in Prague. Her parents divorced when she was a young child. She then lived for some time with her mother at their relatives. When Alena was six years old, her mother moved with her to Děčín, North Bohemia, where she married her brother-in-law after her sister had died prematurely. And this way Alena’s uncle became her stepfather. The witness was very clever, a good learner and keenly interested in the world around her. Her parents supported her in her education, music, and eventually in her decision to become a teacher. Alena Olšanská graduated from the Faculty of Education in Ústí nad Labem with a degree in Russian language and music education. In 1968, she went to visit her half-brother in England, spending there the fateful days for Czechoslovakia around 21 August. She could have stayed in England, but she was unable to contact her mother, so she eventually returned to her homeland occupied by Warsaw Pact troops. She started to work in education and devoted herself to working with young people. In 1995 she became seriously ill and had to stop working. In her retirement she still earned extra money as a tour guide in a travel agency. In 2022 she was living in Děčín.
