Věra Kafková

“Then we also had a sister who had spent a year in Russia. Well, that was a pretty questionable matter, because Dad was a People’s Partyer [Christian Democrat - trans.], and suddenly his daughter goes off to study in Russia for a year! No one wanted to take her to the airport, a friend took her at the time, but then she came back and everything took a turn for the better somehow. But the situation was pretty tense when she first said she was going to study in Russia. But every experience of that kind is useful.”

“I worked at the post office for twenty-five years, delivering post. Not sitting behind the counter... And when I was to deliver a letter with an exotic stamp, from Germany, from abroad, that was something, kind of a thrill. That lady over there, her son’s a doctor and he’s in Germany... So I wondered, I reckoned, her only son, she here a widow and her son in Germany. No one was allowed anywhere, in the beginning it was trouble just to receive a letter from abroad, that got you an entry somewhere. So it was kind of pretty exotic.”