Irena Bláhová

"All the books that dealt with our republic had to be taken out of the libraries. We had to cross out names like T. G. Masaryk, we weren't allowed to have all of our historical figures in our textbooks at all, and everything was crossed out. So it was such a time that we had to learn German, sing in German. And often we used to be afraid of what was going on, because there was a message that the teachers would send us home, because there was a special German unit that would go around the schools and look at the children and pick out the children that would be good for them, for Germanization. So what the teachers did was that they let us out of school in a hurry and we went home. They were very careful about it, so that the Germans couldn't hurt us. That's when I remember they came to the classroom and measured our head and face. To see if we were the German type, if our head was what the Germans needed. Thank God it turned out well, none of us were eliminated."

"There was a lot we didn't like. It affected four teachers. I found out later that it wasn't just the four of us who wrote the newspaper article. So we dared a lot. We dared to write to the newspaper about democracy. Democracy will not reach Vyškov, was the title of the article. It was a terrible halo that we were against the communists. That we wanted to be the kind of nation Dubček proclaimed. We were on their side. We tried to do everything to intervene, there were as many of us as possible, but it was impossible, because the Russians were much more numerous, they overwhelmed us again. We had to obey, but some of them didn't give in. And that included me and some teachers from the school and from other schools. And so the teachers were thrown out. I was one of them, but it wasn't just in school, it was in different jobs. My husband, who was discharged from the army, was also affected. So imagine that the two of us, who had four children, were suddenly out of a job. We both had to look for jobs. Until recently, we found a note where I just got a handwritten note and a pencil on a piece of paper telling me what kind of job they recommended. Among them was a shepherd, or in a factory making some machinery. "