Dr. Dana Seidlová

“There was a kind of core, which did keep together. And then there were a whole lot of people who either didn’t care or actually detested the exile [culture - trans.]. They started feeling like they were something better. So there were various categories, I’d say. There were the centripetal emigrants and the centrifugal ones. So there was a kind of core there, like Sokol, for example. It was a typical diaspora, like the Jewish diasporas I guess. The core of those who maintain their Czech awareness. But not with some kind of base intention, but because of the ingrained need to do so. To talk together, share the newest issue of Dikobraz [a Czech satirical magazine - trans.], for example. There were lots of expatriate books. I’ve brought almost all of them back to Gruntorád again [Jiří Gruntorád, a publisher of samizdat literature - ed.]. There were four publishers, as far as I know, no more. We considered it something of a duty, almost, to support this literature, and so we bought everything. But a lot of the expatriates said: ‘I’m not interested.’ And they didn’t feel the slightest duty to order [books] from Škvorecký.”

“I can’t even describe it really, our idea was just: ‘So this is what freedom looks like.’ Stamps here, stamps there, permissions, invitations, and exit permits... We thought that was something that just had to be but that it was a miracle that the door was opening for us.”

“And then the Americans came, and Dad was the only one in Vlachovo Březí and the whole surrounding area who could speak English. So of course, he welcomed the American in the square and chatted with them. It was at the time when the war was raging in full in Prague. He told them: ‘Keep going, go to Prague.’ Of course, I climbed up on to a tank with him, and I’ll never forget how they showed us a map, and there was a line drawn on the map with the words STOP LINE. And they pointed to it and said: ‘We’re not allowed to go any further.’ We cried terribly because our relatives were in deadly danger and the Americans would just shrug their shoulders.”

“So I started studying, and suddenly I was called up to the dean’s office - there were five of us, we all came from the first year, and we all came to the school with practical experience. That is to say, as laboratory assistants, rehabilitation workers, and so on. They told us: ‘You are secondary-school medical cadre, we don’t have many of those, but we do have enough doctors, so you have to make do with secondary-school education and you are not entitled to study university at all. You’re not working class, you’re from bourgeois families.’ We really were the children of doctors and so on. And that was the end of our studies.”

“I woke up in the morning, and the doctor was standing outside the cottage and looking up into the sky. He kept looking at the sky. He said that there were three tanks in every plane and that he’d counted how many tanks the planes had already taken to Prague. I laughed because I didn’t believe he could ever actually count that. But he was completely serious. Then we felt an uneasiness wash over us, and so we drove down to the town, where we had a radio set. At that point we met my husband, who was on his way back from Prague, and he told us there were Russians in Prague.”