Alena Pechová

"My mum left Czechoslovakia less than eighteen years old under quite interesting circumstances. She was in the theatre with her fiancé, and she was approached by someone during the intermission (some sources say it was a woman, some say it was a man) who asked her to come to Vinohrady after the show. She was given the exact address. Her father was waiting for her there. He explained that times were bad and she had to emigrate. He brought her clothes to the restaurant, her shoes and her passport. One version says she accompanied a blind Czechoslovak military officer. The other version actually involves a marriage, as I saw in the documents we found in the archives. I don't know, and I will never know. We did not ask a lot of questions. After a harrowing journey, she made it all the way to Egypt via Palestine. She was interned in Palestine, it was terrible..."

"I completed kindergarten in Prague. I fell ill with severe scarlatina and then with hepatitis within a year of that. My parents contracted it from me since there was no penicillin then, and they were on a strict diet. Then my parents went to hospital in Karlovy Vary for treatment, and since there was no one to take care of me, they put me in Hodonín with my grandparents. My uncle, my father's brother, was a pediatrician, and they took care of me and I did very well. Then the show trials started in the 1950s, and since my parents had served with the Czechoslovak unit abroad and the British Army, my mother took a resolute action when they started arresting my dad's friends and placing their English wives in asylums and their children in shelters. Within less than a month, we found ourselves in Hodonín through a triple apartment swap."