Ing. Eva Vaňková

"The story was so sad, that we were occupied by the armies of friendly countries from Germany, Poland, Hungary and Russia. That was a rather negative story. But I remember when I heard the news that we were occupied and that Russian troops, tanks, came here - mainly to Vlašim, but also here to us. I was actually... on that day, August 21, we used to go hopping. We always used to go in the second year, in that year 1968 I was in the second year or I was going to start in September the second year of the general secondary school, so we were supposed to go to the hops in the morning at four o'clock by train from the station. And my parents woke me up, and I thought I was supposed to go and I was going, and they said, 'No, no, nothing's wrong, we're occupied by the Russians.' So it didn’t work out, and we didn’t go to the hop-picking summer job. Later on, we did go, but much later, and it was only voluntary by then—it wasn’t mandatory like it was back then. I was alone, so my parents didn’t let me go because they were worried about me. That was something that bothered me a little because about half of my class went."

"My father's or grandfather's family came here to Vlašim around 1920. At that time Vlašim looked completely different, it had about five thousand inhabitants, as far as I could find out, but now there are about twelve thousand. So you can see that the town looked different. The Schiller family came here from Moravia, some of them came through Vienna, four brothers came here. Through Vienna because at that time everybody went there to study or to apprentice, whether it was for high school or studying. And when my grandfather and his brother came here to Vlašim, they built a factory, the factory where we are now, it was a shoe factory. Another brother of theirs, who was a doctor and he studied in Vienna, he was in the army during the First World War as a doctor, and when he came back from the First World War, it was 1918. And because he applied as if he was Czech, they didn't want him in the clinic in Vienna anymore because the Austro-Hungarian Empire had already broken up, so he had no choice but to go to Vlašim. The fourth brother came last, the youngest of them, and he was a dentist."

"I was really happy, I had a strong desire—even when I used to play at being a teacher as a child—but I actually wanted to study medicine. I wanted to work with children, in pediatrics. But that wasn’t meant to be. Even though I passed the entrance exams, I wasn’t accepted. It was the year 1970, not long after 1968, during the so-called normalization period—a complicated time. Back then, other factors and criteria beyond academic performance were taken into account. Unfortunately, I didn’t meet those other criteria, specifically because of my background and the background of my father and grandparents. So, I wasn’t admitted."