Eva Vaňková

"At the time, we would have lived like the gilded youth, rather than go to Komsomol. That was foreign to us. We tried to live the life of normal young people between 1945 and 48. The political situation kept deteriorating all the time. We were also quite philosophical at the time. We were sixteen years old, we knew everything and discussed everything. We decided to live as allies to America, to be Anglophiles. We had our minds set on this and Soviet Union and leftists didn't fit with our vision at all. We wore US flags on our coats, which must have made our dad really 'happy'."

"Our political debates were very unpleasant; at first, dad would try, in a very friendly way, to explain the dialectical materialism to me, and how important and fair a concept it is. I disagreed, so we would argue, and it was ugly. Then, when I fled, it must have been a big blow for dad, personally and politically as well, of course. When I learned about the trial, I lived with the notion that maybe I had caused it all - dad being a member of the group - for a long time. Now, years later, I understand that it had nothing to do with that, because by then, the trial must have been prepared and the people chosen - and not because an eighteen-year old girl left the country for a boy - but because they needed a big trial."

"All in all, thinking about other refugees I talked to who crossed the borders with rifles in their hands and dogs chasing them, the way that I fled was luxury. Later, I was lucky again because I got to a refugee camp in Nuremberg, and I had been there for about three months when Radio Free Europe started recruiting people. They were looking for employees; a group of young Czech people came there and started interviewing us, young university students at the time, and they hired a big group of us. They took us to Munich right away and gave us decent accommodation. Then they determined who would do what; I couldn't do much, really, so they made me the announcer for what they called the 'continued'.