Jitka Vrátníková

"As part of my job, I travelled around the Cheb district to conduct investigations for the court and schools and homes. And once in Františkovy Lázně I missed a bus, so - it was sometime in the winter - I sat and waited for the next one, which didn't come for about three hours. And there a man approached me and asked me if I wanted to go for coffee. And I said yes. And we talked for so long that I missed the next bus, so then I had to wait for another bus, so we had another coffee, and when we parted at the bus stop, he gave me his address, just in case. Well, I hadn't counted on ever meeting him again. When Jan Palach was burned to death, it was something very incomprehensible to me in the sense that yes, Prague was mourning, probably some other cities were mourning too, but they were just mourning and nobody talked about why Palach did it and what he wanted to prove by burning himself. And when I talked about it with people around me, most of them thought that he was mentally unbalanced, that only a fool could do this. I knew that in Asia they used to burn monks to protest, so I kind of understood why the burning. And that it was something so horrible that it should have stirred people up, made them aware, but it wasn't happening at all. I couldn't find anyone who understood my feelings, and I was very disappointed. And every time I felt I couldn't cope with something, I put it on paper. Maybe I burned it or sometimes I sent it to a friend - no reply. So now I wrote my thoughts and feelings on paper and carried it around with me for a while, still adding some other feelings. And then I didn't know what to do with it, I was sorry to burn it and throw it away. I came across this young man's address, so I sent it to him. About a fortnight later, when I came out of the surgery, he was standing in the corridor, but he didn't recognise me, because I'd had my hair cut when I'd been for the investigation. But I had my hair cut in Bulgaria. But before that I had cut my hair and I had it cut into a ponytail. And when I was in the office and when I went to work, nobody knew that my hair was short because I was always wearing the hairpiece. So my husband-to-be didn't recognize me. But I did recognize him, so I approached him like what he wanted, and I was surprised that he came. And he showed me my letter and said he wanted to talk to me. And that's basically how we met and started our life journey."

"That was another big shock, perhaps even worse than the year before, because this time it wasn't the occupiers, it was our fathers and uncles and maybe even our brothers. And it was terrible. It was unreal, what was happening. We were standing on Wenceslas Square, I was very close to the statue of St. Wenceslas, and in those side streets were the People's Militia. And suddenly, from the National Museum... [clears throat] armored cars and some special forces came and exactly what happened a year before in front of the Museum happened. They started throwing tear gas. Everybody turned around and ran away, and I was left standing there again. I absolutely didn't understand how our policemen, who were our friends in '68, were against us. Someone came running for me again and dragged me away. In some documentaries I saw on TV, I saw myself, the one person standing there, the only one aside from the fleeing crowd, and then someone ran up and pulled me away. We ran up that first street, like when you look at the statue of Wenceslas to the right. And there we ran into some house that had a glass door. [Clears throat] So, as we ran, we ran and we were left standing behind that glass and we saw the soldiers or the police from the special forces beating the hell out of whoever they came upon. And as the crowd dispersed into these houses, my husband-to-be ran into a house and then he told me how they were running up the stairs and suddenly, on about the third floor, the door opened and there was a mother with a child in her arms motioning for them to go into her apartment. From behind the curtain they were looking out into the courtyard, seeing people being beaten up on those porches who had no chance to hide anywhere. Head to head, blood spurting. My husband told me he had never seen anything like it in his life, couldn't imagine seeing anything like it. And I watched young people being dragged by their legs to the cars, they didn't even move, they didn't even move, they just beat them up. And that's when I realized that I really couldn't stay here."