Jaroslava Dušátková

"The French friend of ours told us that when their passports expired, they simply turned them in. He got some old passports from four friends of his. My husband replaced the photos and changed the dates. We agreed to go to Yugoslavia to a certain place, and he would bring the French passports. We didn't even think to learn the names. We planned to ride a cable car to the border between Yugoslavia and Italy. People go there as tourists, and so we would simply cross to Italy."

"The place smelled of disinfectant, I got sick and turned pale, and the nurse elbowed me out of the room. I went home and I thought, it's as if the communists knew that this is what I hate, or can barely tolerate."

"But in no way I wanted to emigrate, because I had a lot of relatives, sisters, parents. We had a lot of friends. We had a cottage together with some friends, so I didn't want to emigrate in any way and I liked my job. But when I applied, because I wanted to finish my doctorate, I applied to study. And my principal, who was the principal of the school where I taught, refused me. But she didn't tell me. And that made me quite angry, because at that time I had already been teaching for twenty years and had generally been successful, and she, because my father was a private entrepreneur, put me under review and did not recommend me. So it kind of pissed me off and made me agree to it in the end. And on top of that, at school they told me that if I didn't agree to this, my daughters wouldn't be able to go on to college either."

"I started at the Pacific Film Archive, but it wasn't paid. And the first paid position was again in Berkeley at the university, namely in the Music Library. Because I played, as I said, I went to music school, I played the piano and I sang, so I knew something about music. And I started cataloging at Berkeley University in the Music Library. And from there I got out, there I learned a lot of things again, and so on. And I learned that they are opening a librarian position at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. I asked, there was the manager who did the interview with me, he was Polish and I think he helped me a little because I was Czech. So I joined the library there. First it was, what was the name of the function, print, old newspapers or old books were printed. And I was there for about two months, and then I came to book cataloging. And I gradually worked my way up, because there's always some promotion position, right, so I finally got to the Slavic Library. Slavic, you know, are Slavic languages, so I cataloged there, not only in Czech, but in all other languages as well as in Russian. And at Stanford University, a certain professor Tříska taught, who was a Czech who came here at the age of eighteen and was in the department, the Political Science department. She was a very clever person and gradually I also came into contact with her. And when he found out that I taught in the Czech Republic, he recommended me to the language department at Stanford, where they teach all kinds of languages. And those languages that are used a lot, like German, Spanish, or Arabic now, they have special departments. And I got into the so-called Special Language Program, a special language program, where less spoken languages were taught. Like tagalog or pashu or hindi and so on. And among others there were also Slavic languages, because Russian had its own department. And Czech, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, Romanian, that's all on this Special Language program. And that still exists today, yes a special language department. Well, there I am, I've been teaching Czech there for twenty-two years now, and there are still students there."

"I don't remember much about the Second World War, because I was born in 1941 and the war ended in 1945. And as a child, I only perceived that when there was an alarm, the sirens sounded, so I know that we either had to go home or to the basement. I remember that exactly. Then I remember going to get milk for my parents and walking past the house, where the Russians were. That was after liberation. And they wanted to talk to me, but I didn't want to, I was afraid of them. And then I know that there were celebrations in Novy Bydžov and that the Russians had horses there and wanted to take me for a ride. And I didn't want that either."