"It was the first clash that made me realise it was not easy at all. I recall I finished with honours, and applied to study veterinary medicine in Hradec [Králové]. All I knew I had to do was pass the admissions procedure because that determined everything. I was told that I had met the requirements but that my family did not guarantee a socialist upbringing. For this reason, and also because I was not given a recommendation from my school, I was not admitted to study. The credentials said I had a poor relationship with nature, justifying it by the fact that I refused to weed the grass from the pavement in front of the school."
"No one was allowed to speak against the army, but I had heard a lot of that from my dad back home; he disagreed with the entry [of Warsaw Pact troops]. I recall my mother broke down afterwards and was home for a while because of it. She told me that a comrade said to her, 'Well, the party has left you today, and your husband will leave tomorrow.' It really wasn't easy back in 1968. Dad didn't have a job after that. Later on, he started working; first with the Asanace cooperative, but there were many people who had been expelled from the Communist Party, and so the cooperative got dissolved. We didn't have much money before dad started working part-time in the sugar mill. And when someone started talking about liberation at school, I felt really uneasy."
"I never joined the [Communist] Party. I have funny experiences about this. When we started to work on the farm after college, a girl or maybe a young lady, I don't know, came to see me in the cowshed. She addressed me on first-name terms and said, 'Comrade, I am very sorry for coming to see you so late, but I was in the Soviet Union.' I told her that my name was so-and-so, and although I didn't insist on her addressing me with my degree, I was in fact a lady engineer. I told her to check my documents, and that I would not join the Party. She says, 'Well, we have more folks like you, but they always do join.' I told her I wouldn't join. 'Read my documents; they explain why I'm here on the farm.'"
"But at that time everything was strictly recorded, the cyclostyle had such a numbering, so it was obvious how many copies would be made, as it was strictly recorded. Moreover, at this school, it was discovered that someone there is doing something secretly. As a result, they figured out that it was the mother, whose house they searched and found out that there was something about dwarves. And because the girls also had a directory of members of this society, so of course one day they made arrests of several students or whatever you call it. Because they were from all over the republic, and it was very difficult for the policemen at the time to understand that it was just a prank. They wanted to know where the dead mailboxes were. They wanted to know what this meant and saw some conspiracy behind it, when there was none. The worst thing happened to one friend who was detained for two days in the South Moravian region."
Alena Čiháková was born on August 12, 1957 in Trutnov. Her parents were expelled from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ). For the children, it meant a lifetime of carrier difficulties, due to which the witnesses´ application to secondary school go also rejected. She had to go to study at an agricultural college. However, she later made it to high school and college. Because of student recession called Dwarves, the police arrested several students, suspecting them of espionage. Two participants were suspended from school. The witness successfully completed her studies and joined the state farm in Uhřínov in Orlické hory as a zoo-technician. She learned English, listened to Free Europe and Voice of America, and read samizdat. She considered emigrating, but the Velvet Revolution came. In 1991, she received an offer to teach English and biology at a primary school. She worked as a teacher for several decades.
