Lenka Honnerová

“We led a modest life. I am not complaining as there is some good in everything but it was a day to day fight. As when my third child was born: all my kids were born in the course of three years and a half so I have been suffering from bone decalcification and Kuba had the same issues. He was pasing water so fast and he needed to retain water in his body. When I took him to hospital, they told me: “Either you could get bananas which help to retain water and feed him bananas. Or you could leave him with us as we have got bananas.' Quite a choice, isn´t it? To leave a ten day old baby in hospital where I wouldn't be allowed to go and couldn´t be breastfeeding him. They won´t let you stay in hospital with your baby in those days. Even a ten-day old had to stay alone in the hospital. And there were no bananas, they just could not be found. As I had been working as a shop assistant in Družba I had friends there. But it was half a year since I left my job there and as I was on maternal leave all the time I had not right to have bananas. They told me they didn´t have any. But I knew they do have them all the time. I worked there and I saw how it worked. It was for important people and their friends only. So I took Kuba and I ran into the warehouse as I knew the place and I told them they will give me bananas. So I left with bananas. But I couldn´t go there, as an ordinary customer I wouldn't get the bananas... And she would have to leave a ten-day old baby... I know that´s no tragedy. He would survive. But today people just can´t imagine such a thing as today if the child is six years or younger you can stay in the hospital."

“On Saturday there was fifteen of us and on Sunday hundred people came. And on Monday the square was filled with people or at least more than half of it as it was during the latest protest. But they started to speak publicly. There were students speaking. Pithart has come here, Havel has come here. And I went... I have been working at the pub so at five in the evening I went to work. At ten I would leave the job and I went... I had a car. Only few people could give up a car to the cause back then. So I have been visiting colleges where students were printing leaflets, printing... They were writing! You won´t hear it nowadays, to write on a typewriter. They would write all day and I would distribute it, there were two or three of us who were coming at night for the material. We would bring it to the theatre and with the actors we were distributing the leaflets, posting them up and throwing them in the mailboxes. And we would guard what we had posted as the secret police would tear it down. So it would survive until morning. We have been pasting the leaflets on shop windows and there were some brave shop managers who would put post it on the inside. But there were just few of them as people were still afraid back then.”

After I got married and started to experience the ordinary troubles of a family life, I began to realise what it took to get a flat. What it took to get a flat when your sister is in Austria. And what it took to get a flat with heating. As there were the requirements one had to meet to get a gas heating: one had to have three or more children, health problems and had to be a party member. I wasn´t a party member. So I wasn´t entitled to have a heating. I had to heat the flat with diesel which had gone up in price at that time. My income was 700 crowns a month and I spent 500 crowns on diesel so I could heat the flat. So I started to rebel for real. I took my kids and I led them to the Local National Committee where I left them in an office of the lady who decided these cases and I told her as it it warm there I would come to feed the kids because I could not afford to pay for both. And I left. So they... I cried a lot for sure. And I was afraid, of course I was, fearing what was to come. But they brought the kids back with a list of forty flats in which I could move. As they could not install the gas heating because they already refused my request for several times. So they offered me flats in which there already was a heating.