Věra Teplá

"When I worked at the vehicle accounting office, they always came by. And once they arranged to meet on the side where the Brouk and Babka were, the shopping center, the market in Letná. That was down on this side. But sometimes they arranged to meet at Hradčanská, by the subway. And it was hard to run away from there. So when I happened to go there, I went from this side, from the lower part, to Letná. And the person who was in charge there always gave us candy. We got candy. But we mostly bought bananas, which weren't available, and things like that. And at that time, I was there with my mom, as we were working there together. We escaped through the Letná tunnel. When the crowd dispersed, we turned. The tunnel was empty, no one was driving there. We turned there and walked through it, but suddenly we heard a rumbling, as if tanks were driving through. Suddenly, a delegation driving to Letná passed us. All those people from the Communist Party, the government, and so on. So I thought we'd run away, but they drove past us. But as they sped by, they didn't even notice us."

"We learned Russian simply because we had to. And when we were in eighth grade, our Russian teacher was sick for a long time, so another teacher came to teach us. She was a former Russian countess. And she was terribly ashamed of it, she had been here for a long time, of course, they had to flee. And she taught us. She kept apologizing to us, saying, 'I want to teach you this so that you know it when you graduate.' Because there were various exams, so we had to know it. And she kept saying that it wasn't her fault and apologizing. She was really embarrassed about it."