Jana Žáková

“I never liked rote learning, and I was always dismayed when some child felt wronged. You know what a wrongdoing is. Has it ever happened to you that, say, someone accused you of doing something, and you knew it wasn’t true, but you couldn’t vindicate yourself? Well, I think that’s the worst possible thing for both children and adults. So I never wanted my pupils to have that experience, and I always told them, you have the right to make a mistake, and if I don’t know, I ask. I reckon this principle is upheld in your school, for sure. That it’s like that, and if I don’t know, I ask. And I can make a mistake. I know that one boy had trouble writing, and he said, I’m trying so hard! Well, when you know the effort is there, when you know he’s trying, you approach it in a positive way, but when someone’s negative, it doesn’t make such a good impression, does it. Whether it’s the teacher doing it, or the children. School isn’t punishment, you don’t go to school as punishment, right? And theoretically, you should look forward to being there. Although perhaps not always, say when there’s a test...”

“The sirens would always go off in the night, the windows had to be blinded, blacked out, they had to be black blinds - if you didn’t have them, they fined you. I remember one time the sirens sounded, and my parents were so exhausted from all the air raids that they didn’t even hear the sirens, so I woke them up, and then quick, so they carried me. We were hurrying along the street, that was Winter Street in Prague 6, and we were on our way to Grandma, who lived on Somme Street, and I saw planes flying overhead. I can still see it today. That kind of deep humming sound, those weren’t supersonic planes. On they flew, and you didn’t know where they were flying to and where it would hit down. I remember that, I was three years old. But I have it in my memory, I do.”

“So we decided we’d travel to Yugoslavia with Čedok [a nationwide travel agency - trans.]. An organised train journey, very well, but my husband, seeing that he was an officer... he had to request permission, and he actually got the permission, but those weren’t passports, that you might reckon you’ve got your passport and off you go. You got this folded piece of paper, that was a page with your photo, your place of birth, where you live, and exit permission to travel to Yugoslavia say from 5 July to 28 July, that’s it. It was Yugoslavia back then. So we set off, we each had a suitcase, we got on the train, it was a Čedok train, and we set off to Yugoslavia. When we arrived, the paper stated he was a career soldier. We arrived in Bratislava, and they did a passport and customs check. Of course, open your suitcase, that was our suitcase, so we had to show them what we had in the suitcase apart from swimming trunks, towels, etcetera. That was the customs and passport check, except we didn’t have passports, but this was an exit permit, and my husband because he was a soldier, so the Slovak man asks him: ‘And where’s you confirmation that you handed in your personal card?’ - because we had ID cards, and soldiers had personal cards - well, and my husband says: ‘Well, I handed it in, but I don’t have any confirmation.’ Now they start to discuss it; there’re some five hundred people in that train, and the border guard says: ‘Disembark, or the train won’t go any further.’ Now everyone starts telling him: ‘Oh, come on, surely you’ll let him go... He’ll be back in three weeks.’ ‘Disembark, or the train won’t go any further.’ So just imagine, they stepped up to him, the train was just about to leave, they got off the train with him and we continued on our journey, and my husband stood there holding a bag, in which he a mattress and I don’t know what I put in there for him... chocolate, some juice, and he had dinars, secret dinars that we had exchanged somewhere... that someone had secretly sold to us. And we left him there in Bratislava, you can imagine the shock. That was on Friday afternoon, and the train took us further, further, and he stayed there. Now everyone started discussing, oh he won’t go back, what will he do, what will happen. I didn’t know either. We came to Split on Saturday morning, then we took a boat to the island, we got off and came to the guest house. The tour guide, he was coming on forty, he was introducing me to the house manager, and he said: ‘Well, this is Mrs Žáková, her husband had to stay and he might join us later.’ That was such an unpleasant situation, you know, both for him and for me, I wondered, what will I do here... then we went for dinner, then it was Sunday, and we all kept talking about it, and we were awfully sorry about it. I mean I was really sorry because it was our first trip abroad, and I knew it was probably the last one too, and then I saw a boat nearing the island. There was one boat in the morning, which returned to Split in the evening, well, we were sitting there on the strip of beach, bathing, and suddenly I see a figure in the distance, and it was my husband. On Sunday morning. The thing with the borders happened on Friday evening, and now for his escapades. He had to go back, they advised him to hitch a ride, so he left and hitched a ride at the petrol pump. He took a ride to Bratislava, where he went to the garrison HQ. They phoned up Prague to ask if he really did hand in his card. Chance had it that the gentleman who was supposed to have confirmed this was at the cinema, that was another problem. But they sent a soldier to get him from the cinema, he confirmed that it had been handed in under number 39. In Bratislava they gave him stamped confirmation that he had handed it in under number 39, and that was that. So then they gave him some more advice, so he went to a petrol pump and hitched a ride. It was a Wartburg, they already had one Bulgarian with them - he’d ridden in a Fiat before that - they were driving through, headed to Hungary. So he drove through Hungary with them, slept there on his mattress - that is, they put up a tent, and then they took him all the way to Belgrade. He ended up at a petrol pump in Belgrade, he got a map, and he set off back to Rijeka. In Rijeka he hitched another ride. Czechs didn’t take hikers, because they were loaded full of tinned food and all sorts of stuff when they were travelling by private means. He got to Split, and he didn’t know that he had some money in his coat pocket, and he’d lost the dinars somewhere. But he didn’t find that out until we met up. Now, he wanted to board the boar, but he didn’t have any money. They told him five dinara, and he said: ‘I don’t have five dinara. Still don’t.’ Then they took pity on him standing there dejectedly with his bag like that, so they took him on for free, and he was reunited with me in Yugoslavia. So that was quite the odyssey, that was.”