Miroslav Šik

“Mum who spent the first fifteen or twenty years crying. Who actually most of us… in the family, she was the one who lost the most. Because she was in fact a girl who… she ws born in 1924 so she was called to forced labour. As a half-Jew, she was the first on the high school to be kicked out. She was, like, the first one who was forced labourer in some factory here in Prague. So, for her, it was in fact… the 1968 meant for her that she could go to the university. Yeah. There was a programme for the generation who couldn’t finish their studies during the war. That was her dream. So that she finishes, that it will happen, that she will get a university degree. It won‘t be only that, that political school there which, you know, my mom studied at that Communist, marxistic school but that, that’s the political college, it did not work for her any more. You know, and then suddenly there’s emigration and in emigration, she stays Frau Professor Sik. That’s the way how in that time, woman has the title her husband has, it was totally absurd for her. She is at home, a homemaker, she just cooks. Mom never cooked here in Czechoslovakia, almost never. She was like, that girl who wanted to be emancipated… as much as possible in Czechoslovakia. Obviously, she did the shopping because dad was that normal macho, it means, he did nothing at all and he was not able to do anything. So, mom had two jobs, in fact. And childraising, a third one. And still, she kept that big dream, that emancipation. And now she emigrated. She has money enough, she can buy dresses, she can buy things. She lost all friends, all girls stayed here. And she is the one to suffer most. So she cried all those years, almost a suicide attempt. And suddenly mom, how this thing starts, I think it’s called climacteric… at that time, mom makes a180 degree turn, she gives up everything and cuts off everything from the past. And then there’s 1989 and she says ‘But I have no place to return to. I am home here.”

"So we just said our goodbyes and it was such, how the Yugoslavians always do it, always so lively, so there was a wonderful band and everything, music and dance. We went to bed. And we were to, I think, we were to leave in two days, my mom, she was always like that, so she started packing already. And at about 1 am, at night, suddenly we were surrounded with lights that shone inside through all our windows. And when someone of us went outside, there was some, like, secret service, Yugoslav army counterintelligence. And there was, a helicopter landed there. Then, we boarded immediately and in about two hours or so, we were at some airport. And from there, we flew to Pula. From there, we went by boat to some sort of Island where Broz Tito lived. There he had those animals. So, that 22nd August, we are at some island where the parrots are screaming, there was a giraffe and there were some, some, like, predators. And they tell us, there's occupation. That we are guests of the Yugoslav government. That we are going to fly to Beograd, which happened pretty soon, in the evening, we, helicopter, airport, plane... We flew to Beograd. And they drove us in such... The Yugoslavians had those gigantic, huge American cars, automatic. I saw an automatic drive for the first time. I mean, automatic gear transmission. It was what I found the most interesting because to realise that we are occupied... we did not at all, I didn't, nobody did... The only one who realised that was my dad. He was driven separately in another car and later, we found out that he had already contacted Jiří Hájek, the Minister of Foreign affairs who was there, and then some other two Ministers were in Yugoslavia, so that they establish that, sort of, provisional government. Which means, on the 22th, they already sorta established sorta provisional government when those people in Prague were under arrest and they were on their way to Moscow."