"Dimitri knew we were coming. He knew approximately when, but he had no idea where. And he, darling, stood over the highway on these bridges that are over the highway. And he'd look at these buses coming in and he'd stand there for hours and he had his car ready, knowing that when he saw us he was going to follow us because I had no idea where we were going to stay. Whereupon he said he saw our bus from afar, that it was unrecognizable - that horrible, rickety bus. And so he just followed us, drove there. And I remember that we stopped in front of this hostel and got off, and there was a man standing on the other sidewalk. I didn't know what he looked like, just approximately, but he was standing there, and suddenly it was clear to me that it was Dimitri, that he was standing there waiting to meet me. Because he was like a father figure to me, like the single most important man in my surroundings, life, etc. I related to him as if he were my father. Whereupon he wouldn't quite cut the blood in me, and so he would suggest to me that we go in the confusion as everyone was pulling out their luggage, etc. I had a small package for him, my mother gave me one in case it happened. So I pulled out the package and now he handed me some bag with some clothes for me and his daughter, just crap like that. And the guard saw us talking to somebody in there, and it was a mess, terrible. He chased him away, Dimitri just had to leave, so I saw him there for maybe two minutes. Then the guard... I had to sit next to him all the time and I couldn't take part in the tours in Paris, I just had to be locked up in that hostel."
"I came to the nursery and the lights were off in the nursery. And the headmistress - this also comes out of some Kafka thing - the headmistress told us all that there was a war on and that we had to go home. Which makes me... I still don't get that thinking - she just shoved a roll in everyone's hand instead of keeping us safe. I remember coming home with that roll. She said, 'Go home, there's a war on.' So she let the little six-year-olds out and I just went home, and because I know how to go home, I had the key around my neck, or maybe I didn't have it yet, I don't know, but I know how to go home, so I just went home. And now I'm standing there on that sidewalk across from Tyrš's house trying to cross and I can't because there's all these cars going by. And I still remember to this day how badly it went over those cat heads, that it was almost like a little earthquake, how it rumbled inside me - when I go to a concert and you sit me down next to the drums, I just can't, I can't hear it, it's those memories of the military cars. Now there were these transporters going, crazy noise and it was shaking like that. And I was standing there, crying with this roll in my hand, and a man came over and said, 'What do you want?´ And I said, 'I have to go home, it's war.´ So he helped me to run over quickly and then I went home. And when I got home, my mother was already there, Dimitri was already there. I know that my grandmother was already paralyzed at that time, so she was lying there. And they were watching TV, and maybe they didn't even notice that I had come."
"Ever since I was a little kid, as far back as I can remember, it's always been like that - like us and them. I'll give you an example, a stupid, childish one. When it was Easter, you may know that Orthodox Easter can be up to six Sundays away from Catholic Easter, in our house it was called Bohemian Easter. So when Russian and Czech Easter were around the same time, there was no problem. But when Russian Easter was six Sundays away from Czech Easter and I came to school for lunch with a dyed egg, the whole class looked at me like I was eating a rotten egg. So it was kind of, I remember it as a trauma that it was. So I found out very quickly that I just couldn't say things like that and I couldn't show it. Well, and because I was actually six years old in '68 and I wasn't in school yet, so actually I had to learn not to say it from the first grade and I had to learn to pretend that I didn't know Russian, so I made mistakes in Russian classes."
Světlana Wittmannová, née Rafalská, was born on 26 September 1961 in Prague to Irena Rafalská, originally from a Russian family. She never knew her father and lived only with her mother and grandmother. Her grandfather, Vladimir Rafalsky, and great-uncle, Alexander Shcherbachev, were taken away by agents of Soviet military counterintelligence (SMERS) in May 1945 and the family never met them again. She lived through the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in Prague - she has memories of armoured cars in the streets of the capital. In September 1968, her uncle, actor Dimitrij Rafalský, emigrated to Belgium, from where he moved to France a few years later, where he continued to pursue his profession. At school, she experienced ridicule because of her origins. After the invasion, she stopped speaking Russian to her mother. While studying at a language school in Ostrovna Street, she met her uncle in Paris on a trip, which later caused her problems. In 1980 she graduated from the Jan Neruda Gymnasium in Prague’s Lesser Town. In 1984 she left for Belgium, where she married a Czechoslovak emigrant. In 2023 she lived mostly in Prague.
