Zuzana Holá

"People helped me enough. That joke about someone grabbing you on one side of the intersection and dragging you over your resistance to the other side, even though you don't want to go there, that was classic. Someone saw that I was standing there indecisively, not seeing the traffic light, so every now and then there was someone who grabbed my arm and just dragged me - the resistance - to the other side and I didn't want to go there at all. And I learned a lot. And then when I saw it, I couldn't get used to it. I was getting on the trolley and I knew I had to lift my leg up a lot. And I could see where I was stepping, but I still lifted my foot so I wouldn't fall on the steps. So that was hard to get used to. I always attracted attention by acting abnormal. I could see in the carriage that I had something to hold on to, because I could see that I had a stiletto above me, I would raise my hand and good. I was just groping and not looking. So that took me longer to get used to. I'm still getting used to it, actually. Sometimes what happens is that I'm heading for the door and I raise my hand in defense so I don't bump into it, even though I can see the door is open. So that took me longer to get used to."

"I couldn't get into the hotel - so the windows. I found myself not in the ladies' room, but in the men's room. I took the fire escape up to the first floor and there I asked the first machine gunner that I was the interpreter for the president of the congress and I didn't know where to go, that I was lost. They brought me upstairs to the suite, I knocked and the editor and also the editor-in-chief of the Slovak magazine Slovenka was standing at the door and showed me that Gusta was sitting on the balcony on the terrace, rocking and looking out to sea. She already knew what had happened to her interpreters. I went up to her and said, 'Honour the work,' because they were bugging me all the time in the car that I should say that. So I went around to the other side and shouted in her other ear, because I thought she was deaf. She didn't say anything again. Then she turned around in the rocking, swivel chair and said to the editor who was living with her, 'I don't want her.' But the congress was starting, there was nothing to be done, she had to take me. And that first day she never approached me directly."

"I had a scooter and I was fabulously good on it. I was so sorry that it was so plain compared to the others that had a brake, a bell and a light. I only had a wooden one and a light one. Dad explained that those who had the frothy scooters were stupid because it made the scooter heavy, but I had a great one. I won. I had to win because I had a great scooter. 'Foot forward!' he always shouted at me from the balcony. A Russian boy was looking at us sadly. They'd made him a uniform and he had a revolver or a pistol. What the difference between them was, I don't know to this day, but it had a long barrel. And his comrades in arms made him a little submachine gun. That's what he normally carried, all these soldiers carried a gun. They'd always take it off and go, 'Give me watch!' And this boy stood and watched gloomily as we rode the scooter, and he didn't know what it was. You could tell he wanted to ride it. And the scooter ride looked easy, so he thought he could do it on the first try. He went up to a Czech guy, took the scooter from him, took off and fell off. We all laughed and he took out his machine gun and shot the kid. And that was it."