Dagmar Takácsová

"I remember elementary school. How, for example, we were told about the death of Stalin and then Gottwald. The teacher was crying, and we looked at her as if what was going on, because we knew from home who Stalin and Gottwald were. Even then, we knew it was all pretended. Somehow, we guessed it from what we heard at home, what we were brought up in at home, and what was said at school. Even then, as small children, we knew that it was pretended and that it was two-faced, that school was something else and family was something else. From a very young age, as far back as I can remember, I perceived the contradiction, the differentiation, between the family education and the school education in that area, not so much in the general area of values, because that school, despite the communist education, educated us in many things to honesty, truthfulness, hard work, not everything the school taught us was bad. But the duality between the perception of the world in my family and at school, I perceived that from very early childhood."

"I say that they were stellar moments. I remember the assembly under the scientific library under the balcony when Havel was there. Fog, cold, we were freezing, but it was something amazing! It was as if the shackles fell off a person somehow. I even remember when the general strike and then the gathering started to be organized, and since my colleagues at work knew my opinion, they came to consult: `Are we going to go on a general strike? Shall we go to the meeting?` So you hesitate, of course we go! That was beautiful. Beautiful and hopeful and we all thought it would be good."

"That's how it was, we experienced it very deeply, and I still understand that his sacrifice was actually the maximum that a person could do. From the moral point of view, we valued it as the maximum possible. It actually couldn't bring about any specific changes, but I think that it morally supported at least a part of the nation, in those next difficult years, and that it seemed to return that piece of lost honour of that nation that we lost with the Munich Agreement."

We always went to church in public, we were never afraid to go to church, nor were we ashamed of it. The consequence of our attitude was, on the one hand, that my father had to leave that place at school, and, on the other hand, that my sister, a very gifted child, did not get into grammar school - she then went to a business academy. And my brother also didn't get to the grammar school, he went to the High School of constructions. Thus, they could not choose their profession according to their decision as they wanted but had to adapt to the fact that they did not have the so-called good personnel review. Not so much because they didn't have a working-class background, because they did, but because of the family's religious beliefs.

We, the youth, believed it, we hoped it would be better. My brother even became politically involved in the party in which Milada Horáková was. So, he started to get involved in politics at that time and the year 1968 came. My brother emigrated in fear of the consequences. He emigrated after August, he emigrated to Switzerland, where he lived his entire life. They let our parents go there to see him, they were there about five times. I was only allowed to go there after the coup in 1989. They didn't let him into the republic, so he didn't ask for what was possible. He said that he wouldn't make the communists so happy, and they didn't even let him go to his mother's funeral. He also never forgot that he couldn't even come to our parents' funeral, nor to our father's, nor to our mother's.