Alena Mikešová

"The German side, they gave us the money to give to these people... to support them a little bit, but then, as I say, if it was a family, they got maybe fifty marks, but what was interesting was that at the time of the asylum applications, it was already a time when these people arrived, got money and lived in a guesthouse. They didn't work because they couldn't. And they got this Goethe Institute right away to learn German. But I knew some people who, when they went there like that, they said - no, we don't go there... I said: why, you need the language, don't you? And because of this and that... so I always thought: you're stupid, because that offer... that Goethe Institute cost six hundred marks a month, it was the most expensive language school."

"...it changed a little bit in the Czechia in that people didn't get passports like normal passports, but they got grey passports and they could go to Yugoslavia with them. And a lot of people, it was more or less a kind of second wave after the '80s, a lot of people fled in the '80s, it was thousands of people with those grey passports too. And it was like, they would come to our parish and they would talk to each other and we would give them dictionaries and we would give them money to start with. It wasn't a lot, but they each got twenty marks and the dictionary, well, and all sorts of things that they needed, to call somewhere or to write something, to get information or something. It was such a rush of people, it was like two years that they used to queue across that yard, well it was so touching. And that was also the time when there were some people like that who came in amongst them, and as I say, you could see that they had other interests. - Hod di you regognize it- Well, he said, what's your name? And I always said, well, it's not that important and what would you need and this... I don't know how to say it. We also had, like, two times when we got a phone call at home. I don't know where he got the number either..."