“We were terribly surprised in 1968 when we went shopping with Dad, and we started overtaking tanks, one after the other... I cried awfully as a little girl because the tanks were making grooves into the asphalt and causing terrible damage to the road. I didn’t feel safe either, when Dad had to overtake the tanks. We returned and I was very agitated. Then I started my second year at school, and after a month my family decided to move to Holland. There were a lot of tanks in the streets and things were tense.”
“I was almost at the end of my studies, and I mentioned to Grandma that I’d like to visit Bohemia and that I’d like an emigrant passport. I asked Grandma to write me a request so I could go and visit there. So Grandma filled in the request, and when I read it, it stated that her granddaughter Lucie Poppová is certainly in no way interested in any passport to the Czech Republic. She wrote something completely different there because she was terribly afraid that I would go here and something would happen. My parents explained to me that various people escaped abroad, and when they returned, they were arrested, that they could get into terrible trouble. My parents basically kidnapped three minors and took them abroad, and they afraid if they were in danger of imprisonment if they returned. They were constantly worried about that.”
“I would like to tell everyone to visit some free country over the summer, or for young people to go work as an au-pair in countries like the Netherlands or England. I meet people who have worked abroad and are wonderfully liberated of that kind of... I don’t know what to call it... human rancour. I get on really well with people who have spent at least half a year or a year in some country that I was in as well, because we can have a nice chat together, we can build up a positive mood. There’s laughter, friendship, sincerity, which I find very rare here, especially in the cities.”
We saw tanks on the Polish border before 21 August 1968
Lucie Poppová was born in 1961 in Nepomuk, but she grew up with her family in Prague. In August 1968 she witnessed the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces, and a month later she emigrated to the Netherlands with her parents. She returned to the Czech Republic in the mid-1990s - this decision was facilitated by the fact that her daughter refused to speak Dutch from her early childhood.