"And there we were with some... father and son were coming from Italy by car, so they took us. They had space, so they took us in the car and we actually went there with these. So we were happy because there was a rumour that the Russians had raped everybody on the way there, that kind of rumour. So we were just glad that it was two guys, even though the guy was actually young too. Well, and they actually took us to Pankrác here in Prague, and because it was martial law, so you weren't allowed to go out at night, so we were lucky that there was an aunt who we stayed with."
"Then in the evening... we were going to Vienna and back home. And when we were on the train in the evening, then in the morning, we were sleeping there and in the morning people were going to work and so on. Only we saw that in the newspaper, when they were reading the newspaper, they had a picture of a tank at the Powder Gate (Prašná brána). And we just thought that was strange - the Powder Gate in August, that it should be in May when the Russians arrived. Well, so they gave us the newspaper and we read that it was... Well, and then we got off in that Vienna and we went to the embassy and they told us what to do because the trains weren't running that day. Nothing was going to our country. And they didn't give us any advice because they didn't know anything either. So they just said, 'Well, do you want to stay here?' So they named countries where we could wait, but we didn't want to."
Alena Uhlířová, née Tomášková, was born on 10 July 1945 in Písek, but grew up in Prague. She comes from a family of teachers. She studied computer technology at the University of Economics in Prague and from the 1960s worked at one of the first computers located in the Brussels Pavilion on Letná. In the summer of 1968 she went to Innsbruck, Austria, for a summer job. On the train on the way back, she learned about the August invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact armies. In Vienna, she, her sister and a friend tried to arrange a way back and eventually managed to return by car with other Czechoslovak tourists. Alena worked as a computer programmer, married in 1970 and raised two children.
