Eva Grafová

"Of course, when Munich came, the Germans took over the Sudetenland, and my mother told me about Žatec—what it had looked like there when Henlein had come to visit. She described how the people who used to greet them with respect crossed to the other side of the street. How the Žatec women knelt and kissed the ground on which Henlein walked. My grandfather was a visionary, as Jára Cimrman would say. He made business with hops, especially with foreign countries, as far as I know quite a lot with China, and put the money into London banks. So, when the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia and created the Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren, they had enough money to get out, but it was almost too late. Only thanks to the fact that the oldest sister of my mother was a doctor, as well as her husband being a personal doctor of the American Ambassador in Prague, the whole family managed to obtain American visas and leave after the 15th March—actually, not very long after that. I´d say it was some time towards the end of March. My grandfather and grandmother had left a bit earlier, and my father and mother went slightly later. In fact, they travelled by train across Germany with their American visas in the time when Czechoslovakia no longer existed. I remember my mother telling me that when they arrived (I think it was at Ostend, but I am not sure), the grandfather was waiting for them there, and when he saw them, he knelt down and kissed the ground."

"One fine day they moved some people we didn´t know at all into our flat. Some man by the name of Rybáček appeared with his wife who was Bulgarian and didn´t speak Czech, and they started to live in our flat. It was shared between two families because they said it was too big for one family. The wife had TB. Luckily, I didn’t catch it from her, but I did catch the antibodies, and since then I have never in my life been vaccinated against TB, as I developed immunity. Anyway, to live in a shared flat with strangers, especially Communists, when you think about it a bit, it will dawn on you that this is no existence, it´s not for living. My mother totally collapsed because of that because, to top it all off, she had come back from England, and I suppose this was because of my father. All her family stayed in England, both her sisters and her parents. Naturally she was even more unhappy because of that. My father was a born optimist, and I think he managed to endure all this a bit better, but she was in a terrible mental state. This, in fact, destroyed the rest of her life, and she was not even 40 at the time, I think. Then, and I don’t remember this as I was too small, my father did something. He installed a cardboard partition, making it possible to divide the flat. There was a corridor to walk in and out. They created two flats with a common toilet and the main entrance door. But owing to this partition, we lost the bathroom, and I lived without it for 29 years. We took a bath in a tin bathtub using water from the kitchen tap, and had to use a jug to empty the tub. Every week. It was not possible to take a bath more often, the process was too complicated, so once a week it was. The kitchen was ours. The second family had the bathroom and their flat could be exchanged, so during the years we lived there the neighbours kept changing. About 4 or 5 different families lived there, but we had no opportunity to exchange. Without the bathroom there was no chance. There was space to build a bathroom (there was a nice storage place), but my father had no money to do so. There was no water system, and they would have had to cut into the wall to install one. Father had no money because finally he ended up as a tinsmith earning some 600 or 700 Kč a month. He commuted to Dolní or Horní Počernice to work as a tinsmith, leaving at 5 in the morning by train from Těšnov."