"We took the train to Afghanistan. It was counted as a semi-communist country, so they gave us a permit - an exit clause - they gave it to us quite easily. Just the two of us, because there was no chance with any expedition to get in. We read somewhere in the newspaper that a year before, an Austrian woman, Eva Schrom, and her brother had gone to Afghanistan in a Volkswagen - which was quite possible - and climbed Noshak. So that was something for me - 'If these guys climbed it, we will climb it too'. Only we didn't have a Volkswagen, but we knew that you could go via Moscow to Tashkent, which takes seven days, and you could get off before Tashkent. The Poles advised me - they had a smuggling trail there. The Poles were always smuggling, they were good businessmen. They bought sausages in Poland, I think, and sold them in Russia and bought vodka, and in Termiz they used to cross the Amu Darya River - there was a small border crossing for Uzbeks who lived in Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. Three times a week there was this boat that went there. So I knew from the Poles exactly which days it went. The destination of the Poles was India - I don't know where they sold the vodka - but they bought clothes in India, and then it started with us, all kinds of colorful ones. They sold that somewhere in Vienna on the Mexikoplatz and got rich. The whole result of the tour was that they made money. Some of them went through China and bought mainly some electronic keyboards or something - you know Poles. And they were definitely smuggling hashish, that's another thing. From Afghanistan, because there it was completely free. Because I know that when we were coming back the same way, they were looking at our sticks. We didn't smuggle anything. My friend got shot there, I wrote everything in the book (Cho Oju). But it wasn't the Taliban yet, it was some robbers. I went alone and in 11 days I climbed the Noshak alone. That was a big achievement at that time, although it's not a difficult mountain. Then they wanted to kick me out of course (of the mountaineering association) for being against some expedition rules or whatever they made up. They had rules. But of course, when you don't have a chance to get on any official expedition, you look for another way."
"I wanted to study natural sciences, mathematics. I didn't like the idea of believing in something uncritically. I missed the proof somehow unconsciously and I didn't know the humility of life that usually leads people to faith, because in a way they find support in it. I'd seen a lot of those religions, and so I'd developed a kind of detached perspective, along the lines that all religions are just different windows into how people view God. I take it with humility. If I had to define God within myself, I guess it would be the logic of the laws of physics. I see the logic of the Big Bang, for example - the intervention or function of some element that controls it all. It's associated with a huge release of energy. It's hard for me to imagine someone, some old man, creating all of this, although I'm quite familiar with the Bible, because I went to religion at that time. I was interested in that as well, so somehow not in great detail, but in principle I know the biblical history of the Old and New Testaments. From that, one gets something in the sense, one grows a consciousness that basically everything is going to turn out well. That there is some providence, I don't know what we can quantify it to or express it in some probability laws or whatever, but one develops a belief that it makes sense to behave decently, not to do evil and harm to other people. It's actually a matter of will, whether one wants to or not. It's like an axiom in mathematics - you either accept it or you don't."
"This mathematics is the oldest science in the world, it was created in parallel with the development of human thinking. ... That ancient mathematics was very developped. If it hadn't been interrupted by the rise of the Catholic Church, we would have been somewhere else long ago - the Greeks were very close to it. You see it as such circles of knowledge, like looking at a tree stump. First of all, it resulted from that developing intellect, but it also influenced the intellect, at least as I see it. It's an immaterial science, it doesn't investigate anything concrete, but it's like the nervous system - you don't see that either, but it's underneath the reality. That's how I see it. The way I see it is that all the sciences that have gotten anywhere properly are based on mathematics. Physics quite obviously - Newton, who lived in the 17th century, actually built all of modern physics through mathematics, which was then advanced by Einstein. Physicists probably wouldn't like to hear that, but it was a kind of romance between mathematics and physics. But gradually it blended into the other sciences. DNA research, that's actually probability theory, it plays a strong role there. Mathematics both initiated and accompanied all the other sciences. Always in the end, when it wanted to be rational and backed up, not to be some kind of fiction, it was always backed up by mathematics. It's such a basic regularity, such a nervous system. She's also awfully elegant. ... For one thing, the logical construction is beautiful, you always see the construction there. There are some basic precepts that cannot be forbidden - these are the so-called axioms - and from them everything else is deduced only by logic. And what can be deduced by means of that logic is declared to be true. This is not so in other sciences, it comes about in all sorts of other ways, and in some even the one who shouts the loudest is right. The building resembles a Gothic cathedral - the axioms are the columns, there is this wonderful vault on top of them, but it is elegant, it is miniature - with the smallest possible means, so that Gothic is a kind of medieval functionalism. I see it as a kind of analogy. Everybody may not see it that way, but I see it that way, and that's why I like it so much. There are definitely some parallels in music, and especially in polyphony. For it to work out, for that Bach, for the voices to clash - it's actually each going by itself and it always comes together in that chord - so it's actually a mathematical problem. And he was supposedly also very good at mathematics."
photo: Cho Oyu: Turquoise Mountain - publication by Dina Štěrbová
photo: Cho Oyu: Turquoise Mountain - publication by Dina Štěrbová
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Margita Schochmanová was born in 1940 into a typical Bratislava family of mixed Hungarian-German Catholic faith. She remembers the deportation of her Jewish neighbours, the Neuschloss family, and her fear of the Gestapo who lived in the same house. She vividly recalls her mother’s hysteria when the family was hiding in the cellar during the bombing of Bratislava. After the war, her father was arrested and detained for nine months because of his German origin, and the family was threatened with deportation. When Dina was eight years old, her younger brother died of a poorly treated appendicitis. This unnecessary death took root in Dina and later motivated her to apply to study medicine. Due to a bad cadre profile, she was not allowed to study medicine, so she studied professional mathematics, which she then taught at Palacký University. She lived in Olomouc with her husband - ecologist, teacher, documentary filmmaker, water sports lover and post-revolutionary dean of the Faculty of Science Otakar Štěrba. From childhood she was attracted to various adventures, from crawling through the forgotten corridors of post-war Bratislava, to a secret trip at the age of fourteen to the Tatra peaks, to rafting down wild rivers in Asia and America with her husband. However, she was most attracted to mountaineering: in the seventies she climbed several six- and seven-thousanders, including Lenin Peak (7134), Noshaq (7492m) and Korženěvská (Ozodi) Peak (7105m). In 1986 she was the first woman to climb Cho Oyu (8188m) together with Věra Komárková and Sherpa Ang Rita. Two years later she and the Slovak climber Lívia Klembarová climbed another of the world’s fourteen eight-thousanders - Gasherbrum II (8035m). At the beginning of the 1990s, she tried to climb Mt. Everest twice. In 2006 she co-founded the Czech hospital in Karakoram, which she still runs. In 2023 she was awarded the Silver Medal of the President of the Senate and in the same year the Medal of Merit 1st Class by President Petr Pavel. She is the author of several books, including Cho Oyu: Turquoise Mountain, Wandering Canadian Rivers, and Desires and Destiny, which trace the history of women’s mountaineering.
