Zdeňka Stiborová

"Because my sister and I left on August 17, 1968, to visit my grandmother where my mother lived, and when we left Prague at midnight, I remember standing at the window and that night the sky was full of stars, it was incredible. And I was looking at it and I was like, 'God, it's beautiful, it's all so beautiful.' Now imagine this: we're travelling all night, and suddenly in the morning we arrive at Čierná pri Čope and there's this rumbling noise. What's going on? And they were transferring trains to another track there and we were a civilian or civilian train and we had to give way to a train that was going with soldiers and tanks just, we didn't know where, nothing. So we were standing at the window and we were looking and I said, 'What the hell is this? Didn't they say there was going to be a military exercise?'"

"Because my dad was a Volhynian Czech, the whole clan lived in Volhynia for years, and in that year 47 the Czech government decided that whoever wanted to return to the Czechoslovak Republic would be able to buy their way back and return, so around that time, around that year 47, a lot of people returned home to Bohemia. And among them was the family that included my dad, and he just didn't want to stay there without his family. He was already married to my mum, and they were expecting me, and they just decided to go with them."