Eva Vaculíková

"By getting married, I found out ‘to whom I got married', I would say. It was during the first thing I did after getting married, changing my ID and my passport. First I filled out the paperwork and handed it in at the counter and the lady threw it back to me with some kind of gesture and said, 'You didn’t fill it out.' -'How so? I've got everything.' - 'You don't have any foreign relations there.' - 'I don't have any foreign relations, what do you mean?' - 'Your uncle.' - 'My uncle is in Bratřejov.' - 'Your husband's uncle and his brother. You don't have that listed here.' - 'I don't have any contact with them, I've never seen his brother, nor his uncle.' - 'Put them there.' So I stopped arguing, but I thought there must be something wrong. 'I don't even know their exact address, I just know their names.' - 'Then write down what you know.' So I wrote it down. Then I came home and I told my husband. He turned pale and said, 'It's impossible, what do they even want from you.' And then it became normal. The fact that my husband had a brother who went to Canada in '68, first emigrated from Yugoslavia to Austria and then to Canada... Because his uncle had been in Canada since around '49. Unfortunately, he defected from the army, so he was not allowed to ever come back, because he probably had a death sentence. That uncle then vouched for my brother-in-law. He guaranteed that he would take care of him there, so he could go to Canada to see him. So that started the trouble."

"The meeting was held at the U Klesků pub and I think there were around three hundred people there. There were wall-to-wall people, the pub was bursting at the seams. So basically, people came and they let out all the bitterness that accumulated in them over the years. The way everybody felt. The speeches were artless, just the farmers crying there. They were saying how they lost everything. How the communists had robbed them, how they had taken away the best things they had. How they broke their families, destroyed everything. Those people literally cried there. They cried and spoke about their problems. The meeting lasted a very long time, four or five hours."