Pavla Vitvarová

"I've always been a rebel, an adventurer, and it didn't bother me at all that I didn't speak English. I guess I wasn't very responsible because I left my son with my parents. Because we didn't know how it would turn out and if we would have to go back. But it worked out and I went straight away to the Czech embassy to apply for my son. All they had to do was fill out some paperwork and apply in the Czech Republic. There were the Madrid and Stockholm agreements stating that close relatives must be allowed to reunite. My parents could also emigrate if I wanted to. They let Dan go, but my father decided that Dan was going to finish school, so he kept him for another year and then brought him to Bayreuth in a Trabant."

"My father delivered mail in Rychnov during the war, it was a tough job. He rode a bicycle and skied in the winter and probably had no thoughts of communism then. It was only when he started working in the factory that they probably pushed people hard. Dad was signed up for the militia and was automatically a communist. Mom hated it and they fought a lot over politics. Mom blamed him for not having time for his family. My mom earned money by stringing beads or making rosaries for Africa at home. I remember helping her many times when she needed to finish her work—we’d sometimes be making rosaries until midnight. Mom wanted to pay off the house installments. I think my father was naïve but an honest communist. It got to his head, though. At first, he seemed so innocent, but he did well in his career. He started as a lathe operator, then became a machine adjuster. At forty, he finished technical school and became a planner. His job was to calculate how long it took to produce a single part. He set tough standards, and people hated him for it."

"Well, I took him [my son] with me to Canada, but not until a year later. Because when we applied for visas for Yugoslavia, which was a so-called half-capitalist, half-socialist country, if someone from the Czech Republic wanted to go to the West, they had to apply for a visa. And the communists checked that out and maybe my father was a communist, so they thought, yeah, I guess we'll give them the visa, but it took six months to get it, and in the meantime my father signed my son up for the pioneer camp. And because nobody was allowed to know that we were running away, that we were going to try to get out of Yugoslavia, so I couldn't tell my father that Dan wasn't going to the camp, that we were all going to Yugoslavia. So he stayed here and I thought what if we didn't make it, or what if we got arrested and he got even more scared, he was fourteen, thirteen, so I left him and he stayed here with my parents for a year. I went to the Czech embassy to ask for him, first I went to the Red Cross, international, and they told me that the only way they would help me was if the Czechs didn't allow me to bring him to Germany. But at the embassy I filled out some papers and I got a message that Dan could come to me immediately. But Grandpa said no, that they would keep him here to finish his schooling, the last year, which was nine, eight. So he ended up, Grandpa brought him in a trabant to Bayreuth in June, that was a stir too, because although the Germans knew that there were trabants, but there were none running in Germany because they were forbidden there, they had bad combustion. But he came there with him, brought him, and then the three of us flew to Canada."

"We did it the way a lot of Czechs did it, about eight thousand Czechs altogether, through Yugoslavia. And the interesting thing is that two days after we applied for the visa overland, we had a round trip ticket, Prague to Zagreb and Zagreb back to Prague, but because we were going overland, we applied, we gave the rings and everything, we paid for the visa in Yugoslavia and we took the train through Austria to Germany to Nuremberg, and then there's this... in Fürth there was this camp, this refugee camp. Because we had valid, valid visas, they had to let us in. At the border, they took our IDs, and now we sat there for about an hour and we were like, now they're going to send us home because they know we have a ticket, so why are we taking the train? We said, well we wanted to go by land. They thought it was strange, but they couldn't do anything because we had valid visas. So we got as far as Germany, there I said, as we walked to the camp. There they accepted us, I don't know if it took fourteen days before they granted us asylum. And in that camp, interestingly enough, it was actually a military... it was a military barracks for American soldiers who had left, so they used this as a place for these emigrants who were fleeing."

"Yeah, in '68, I was living in Jablonec, across from the post office, and when they arrived, we could hear the tanks rumbling over the cats' heads. We lived opposite the post office, and the tram still went past us, and they went and didn't stop, they went through Jablonec and went straight to Liberec. And that was, we were terrified, because we didn't know what was going on. But then I had enough of my own worries because I had a baby, and then I didn't care anymore, and then we just kept our mouths shut and kept up, and it was even worse than it was before."