Kristina Černá

"I will never forgive the Russians for when they occupied us on the 21st of August, because it was a day when I had arranged to go out with my parents.. We lived on the outskirt of Bratislava and beyond us were vineyards and the Small Carpathians, and such groves, and we were arranged, that we will go to roast sausages in those groves. I really looked forward to it... I got up from the bed and I ran into my parents bedroom, but they were not getting up. I told them: »What's going on? Why? We are going to«... But they told me »We are going nowhere Kristinka, it's bad, Russians came. « They had a small transistor radio and they were listening to it. And instead of roasting sausages I stood in queue for potatoes because the queues created almost immediately. People suffered to panic, they were creating stores and so on. At our street there was a long road, they called it Pekná cesta (mean Nice Road) and the housing development we called Krasňany (the Nice housing development). It was no Krasňany, all of those names were just literal translation from German, because the housing development was called Schönsdorf and that Pekná cesta was called Shönweg, of course. Beyond us, in those forests, where Pekná cesta ended there was a garrisoned ammunition depo. We didn't know about that, we only knew that there was a garrison, but then we say morning tanks. We thought, "so this is what the occupation is going to look like."

“We arrived; it was my first experience with capitalism, more likely with capitalistic country abroad. I was 10 or 9 years old, and now, when I arrived to Vienna and there was uncle Karel (Krautgartner), who was excellent musician, leader of jazz orchestra and I don’t know what else. I perceived him mainly as an uncle, a great one, who loved children and ice cream. I loved ice cream too. And the capitalism seemed for me unbelievably great, perfect, because he…as adult people…those times were exciting, all the people were discussing and so on...They had a dog, and with that dog, they went for a walk at midnight… and at the midnight in Vienna there was a place called ice-salon, it was a shop with ice cream and there at the midnight they had 20 flavours of ice cream, which they were selling. I had totally bulged eyes and Karel was telling me : »Come on lets have one, won’t we«“

“So I finally graduated the university, and when I did that, I went to work at psychiatric hospital in Kroměříž at a post of clinical psychologist. I worked there for two years, but I had to leave because they didn’t extend my contract and there was an incident, when the director of this hospital tried to beguile me into KSČ, and I refused to. He said to me: »Don’t refuse it so fast, think about it. You know, if you were in KSČ, there might be a chance to do something about that contract.«I got angry and I went to the director, who was in charge of the entire hospital. So I made a lot of complaints and I told him, about the extortion from the director of psychiatric hospital. It was like he turned to stone. "How do you think that?" he asked me. So I explained it all and he knitted his brows. So, it was a big mess around all the hospital, but I left through the centre. I had to leave, but the director of the psychiatric department got a bad reputation from party groups, “Not this way Comrade. We can’t motivate young this way” My colleagues liked me for that, because he was attracting all the young psychologists and psychiatrics that way.”