"I got lucky twice, and I was very happy about that," she explained. Once, I was right there at the Castle in an office with a Norwegian journalist. And I was proud, really happy about it. It was a short conversation, probably prior to the King of Norway was supposed to arrive, and then Havel said to me: 'Well, I don't know Norwegian at all, but I feel that you are saying absolutely everything I said.' That made me feel very happy."
"That was all that was possible, new films like that since the mid-60s. In the high school I attended, we even went to England with the school, because the borders had opened up a little. In addition, I went to a building that was completely new, the high school, so they brought the principal from the English school in Newcastle and about twenty of us went to England. It was just something, we could not even believe that we got that lucky, and it was interesting. That Newcastle was such an industrial town, those people lived very much like us, in a way, and yet it seemed to us that ours… we lived in families and went to school with those children for about five days. And suddenly it seemed to us that we were more educated than them, more well read, that we knew much more about world literature. But again, we didn't recognize in the picture when there was a uniformed lady on a horse, so we didn't recognize that it was the queen. Because they were terribly focused on their Great Britain or possibly the whole Commonwealth, but for them to read Hemingway or Feuchtwanger, it's just... It was interesting to observe."
"That first year of study at the Faculty of Arts was very interesting, because there were wonderful professors, authors of all kinds of dictionaries, Ivan Poldauf, Mr. Nosek and simply people who were wonderful. They embraced us an awful lot of us, maybe they knew it would not work anymore; and the political topics, which were still quite communist before, were now more relaxed. We were sitting and having fun and some of those young people were very… Suddenly they were asking! Our professors were not very used to young people asking questions, because there was such a discipline, so now it got more relaxed. Moreover, the first year was wonderful, but gradually one by one the best professors disappeared because they had to leave because of the so-called background checks. Those people had to, those teachers, but also my father, had to go to their bosses for background check and they had to express what they thought about the fact that the Warsaw Pact troops came to us."
Barbora Stejskalová, née Kumešová, was born on December 12, 1948 in Prague. Parents were assimilated Jews, most of their relatives perished in concentration camps during the war. Barbora grew up with her older sister in Prague, went to daycare and kindergarten, and every Sunday she and her parents went on nature trips. After elementary school, she entered secondary general education school, played basketball and remembers the traditional Christmas tournament in Vinohrady, in which teams from all over the country participated. In the second half of the 1960s, when conditions in society relaxed a bit, she went with her class to Newcastle, England. After high school, she started working for three years because she wasn’t sure what she wanted to study. In August 1968, she met her husband at the camp, who was a leader there. She also experienced the occupation of the country by Warsaw Pact troops there, and remembers the tanks driving along the road from Karlovy Vary to Prague. In January 1969, she attended Palach’s funeral. In August 1969, she went to France with her husband, two months later the borders were closed. In September of the same year, she began studying English and Norwegian at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University. During her studies, she was repeatedly disallowed to travel to Oslo and Iceland for internships, although her teachers recommended it. She got married and had two children, and she and her husband repeatedly thought about emigrating. She taught English at secondary school, later mostly Norwegian at a language school. In 1989, she and her husband signed the Several Sentences petition; in November 1989, she took part in anti-regime demonstrations. At the same time, she interpreted for Norwegian journalists at meetings with Václav Havel and Alexander Dubček, and she also interpreted for the King of Norway. In 1999, she received an offer to work at the embassy in Oslo, where she stayed for six years, then moved to the embassy in Copenhagen for four years. Today he lives in Prague.
