MUDr. Anna Dusová

"My daughter was born in April, so I gave birth in the middle of the euphoria and all that. Like, we were so excited. I was actually finishing up college, so I was imagining what everything was going to be like and how wonderful it was all going to be. And my husband was in Cambridge, England for two semesters, so we were thinking the world was going to be open and it was all going to be wonderful. My husband came back, he wasn't even at my graduation because he didn't come back until afterwards, and he was like, 'Everybody abroad says we're going to be occupied, they're standing on the border and that they're definitely...' We didn't believe any of that. We would say, 'They're not going to do that in front of the whole world, to fail like that. I mean, the whole world knows what it's about in our country and that it's all right. It's not happening and it's not possible, it's not going to happen.' Yeah. That was in July."

"Well my earliest memories are of us going to the shelter. It was in the house, there was a shelter made in the basement. It was one room where there were like benches around the wall. That's where we used to gather from all over the house. That's what I remember because then one time a bomb hit our chimney in '45 and it spilled into the basement shelter, so we were all awfully dirty."

"Petr was just over a year old and Hana was three years old. It was tough. If you think about it, it was rubbish. If you saw the leaflet, it actually just said that they didn't have to (go vote), so that people wouldn't worry, they didn't have to go to the polls or agree with everything, but they took it as preparation for subversion, so he got fifteen months."

"My son was in tech school and involved in the revolution, so we were terrified of that. We were scared because we had seen 1968, so we were afraid it was going to be the same again. See, we woke up back then and we couldn't believe at all that the Russians would do that in front of the whole world, that they would discredit themselves like that. We actually heard the planes flying at night and tanks and all that in the morning. It was a terrible shock to us. That was the year my daughter was born in '68. That was the fear in us, and when the boy didn't come home for two days, we were mortified. They were all in the lecture rooms in schools and were being educated, being told how everything was. So, they didn't have the fear in them, and my son said, 'Please, don't worry Mum, it's fine, it's fine.'"

"In fact, I was meant to be born in June, but there were house searches. There was always an SS man and a Czech policeman going through all the flats, and my mother got upset because they just searched everywhere, looking under the beds and just everywhere, so I was actually born a fortnight early."