Mgr. Olga Mandová

“Besides that we studied, some of us applied for courses of the Prague Information Service. I was much interested, I studied Russian and history at the Faculty of Arts, so to serve as a guide in Prague was a dream come true for me. I took all the courses and thought, I do not have to study the history, suffice to know all the sights, where they are located and their particular history. I prepared myself for this. I sat an exam and was asked about WWII. I started by talking about the invasion of Poland, from both sides. The commission went stone-faced. They were absolutely shocked by what I had said. I went on for a while. Then I realised that this is really something that cannot be found in any textbook and withdrew from the exam. One of the ladies on the commission approached me later and said, ‘You did well to withdraw, as we would have to report all of this to university and you would have been expelled.’”

“My parents decided to take a fast train and to travel from Žilina to Prague. The train, however, did not even reach the main station. It stopped at one of the stations in the suburbia. And I remember walking down the long streets at night. I did not know what way to go. In Vršovice, a lady opened a window and called on my parents that they were mad, that they couldn’t go with a child to the city centre and she urged us to sleep in her flat. I fell asleep, I didn’t know what was going on. It was a house with a cock in its coat-of-arms, it still stands there. I could not even thank to that family and I don’t know whether they still live there… The next day when we woke up, we walked outside. The weather was beautiful and there was silence. There was a terrible silence. I experience this terrible silence only once in my life… when Václav Havel died and the procession went to the Castle, the whole city was silent.”