Věra Doušová

"What I see as positive about the pandemic is that there is a lot of solidarity between the people. What we always lack are durable foods. We mainly collect fresh fruits, vegetables, yogurts, pastries, dairy products. We lack pasta, rice, the basic durable. And whenever I spoke somewhere, on the radio, on television, in the newspapers that we needed pasta, rice, oil, sugar, such a wave of help and support arose. Individuals, families, teams from one office or pilots from the airport from Kbely have already twice done as huge a collection to us. Or firefighters from a village or town, school, village, will always make a collection and bring us food, and this has never happened before the pandemic. And now it happens very often and we are happy for it, because without it we would not feed the ones who need it."

"The Czechs simply made very good influence there [in the Soviet Union] in terms of agriculture and qualifications. According to statistics, there was the largest number of university students among the Czechs, and three professions appeared there most often: doctor, teacher and musician, university-educated. I must say that I liked the villagers very much and the Czech village was the first village I saw in the Soviet Union, which was clean and tidy. The houses had painted walls, the windows were glass, the fences were standing, the grass was cut. It was a village that people cared for, and it was obvious. And it was a huge difference from the whole of the Soviet Union that I went through before. So, I came completely excited and said that we had to help these people and that I would do it."

"We had a good house, it used to be a general store on the ground floor, and it had a round driveway in the middle where the van could go. So, Jiřina Šiklová, when she was with us a few times, said: 'Look, a van from France with forbidden literature could come in well here. Would you like to do that?' And I said, 'Yeah, of course.' So, then every month a van came from France, they drove into the entrance, I closed the gate and they gradually unloaded all the books, magazines… there was Testimony, Letters, all those books that were published at Škvorecký or elsewhere. Then there were letters for the families of political prisoners and money for the families of political prisoners. So, they always unloaded it once a month, I had an apartment upstairs where I had two sofa beds, I always put it in those sofas and I had instructions that I should leave it for two or three days if there would be no nothing suspicious if they didn't track the car, for example, from the border and so on, and only then start distributing it. I had a list of addresses, where the magazine would come, which book, which money and which letters, so I did that everytime.”

“It was a kind of coincidence that I started doing this. I had worked in the Soviet Union for several years prior to that, and when the Velvet Revolution started, Václav Havel called me. He told me that he had been in Moscow in January 1990 and that Czech compatriots there presented a signed petition to him and they asked the Czech government to allow them to move to Czechoslovakia. It was because the villages were close to Chernobyl and people’s lives were in danger there. And the president said that since I spoke Russian well and I knew the Russian environment he wanted me to go there and assess the situation and determine whether it was really as they said, and whether they were hard-working and diligent people. Whether they deserved that we take care of them.”

“Compatriots are people who do not live here. Mostly they have been living abroad for many generations, but they are very proud of their Czech heritage and their roots. And I have to say that they are even greater patriots than us. They love the Czech language, they love Czech songs and folk costumes. And this is actually something which their ancestors had brought with them into those new countries where they had started anew. At that time they were very poor, because they did not speak the language and they were not able to do anything, they did not have any friends or acquaintances there. Those Czech folk costumes, Czech songs and books, this is something which they had been handing from one generation to the next, and they are proud of it.”