Pavla Jazairiová

"I met Mufid in a very interesting way. It was at the Spartakiad, when we were both sent as journalists to document it. I have always been poor. During my childhood and youth we were very thrifty. I smoked cigarettes called “partyzánky”, because they were the cheapest. I didn't smoke much. But you just smoke in your twenties. I was smoking those cheap cigarettes, and all of a sudden Mufid appeared. He was cute, very cute. He's still handsome. He's just not tall. He has very fine features. Not only did he have the Sparta cigarettes, but he also had apples. He bought some this summer. He had bigger salary. He had money. He had money for apples. And so he offered me an apple. It wasn't that Eve offered Adam, it was the other way around. Adam offered Eve. He offered me an apple, he offered me a “partyzánka” cigarette; or not, he offered me a sparta. It surprised me a lot. He was polite and kind to me, and I was enchanted. Then he began to recite poems to me in Arabic. He has beautiful Arabic. A very gifted man. An excellent journalist. Only we didn't agree on politics later on, because other than that I must say that we have known each other for a very long time now, because I was twenty then and I'm seventy-seven now. And we are still very good friends with Mufid. Some might ask why we even got divorced. We may be very good friends, but we probably wouldn’t be able to work it out as a married couple. I have a lot of respect for him in many things. He opposed Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein was a very brutal ruler. But there were and still are a lot of brutal rulers everywhere. So far, Assad is the most brutal one. He's probably the biggest killer. But Saddam Hussein also killed many. He murdered people in my Arab family, too. And Mufid was a communist, and still is. That’s a subject that we can't discuss together, nor can my sons, because he finds excuses for Putin and others. So no, it’s not happening. We're not going back to Stalin. Communism in Arab countries is something else, too. Because it was actually opposition. I can't explain politics here, even though I've already understood it pretty well. What’s the politics like in these countries. What's going on there. They are countries where there is oil and so on. And he, Mufid, was a very gifted journalist and he worked with one of those early leaders who came after independence. These countries were a protectorate for a long time. He was with him in China and Africa and I don't know where else. He was already quite famous when some guy from the Arabic Broadcasting Czechoslovakia came there and took him to the Czech Republic, saying that Mufid was going to study journalism in the Czech Republic. He got him a job at the radio station and that's how I met him."

"I've formed a strong attachment to Honza. The Russian invasion was like a slap in the face not only for Honza, but for all the communists. We were still working in the radio then, and they were forcing him, the same way as they were forcing all of us, to sign and fill some papers. I rebuffed to sign anything at that time. I was ashamed. They wanted us to join the party, or the Czechoslovak Socialist Youth Union, or the Women's Union. It seemed so disgraceful to me, as if I had to undress half of my body and walk naked, my lower body naked and walking around Wenceslas Square. That’s how it felt. I felt ashamed and disgraceful. It was so disgusting... The people who... and in general the way they got to power. How they started to persecute people. Dubček was not a superstar, but he was a man who really tried. These were the people who tried. Of course, socialism with a human face was nonsense. It was nonsense. It was a utopia. No doubt. But they were people like Lenka Reinerová, like Honza Zaorálek. Honza Zaorálek was the head of the communist cell in the radio. So he left the radio and he gave them back his identity card. They wanted to keep him, because Honza Zaorálek was a very peaceful person who never raised his voice and never argued, but he had his principles. They thought that they would use him, that he would be compliant. But he wasn't. So at one point he told them during the vetting that he was giving them back his identification card. They asked, 'Why?' And he simply said, 'Because I agree with your goals, but I strongly disagree with the means.' He didn’t think that you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. It's not like that. And he left, because he had his principles, to work in the ČKD."

"Of course, I don't know when it was, because I don’t remember it chronologically anymore, but they noticed that I was traveling. So they sent for me and it was at the Square of the Synek Brothers. I think it was there. Or not. They just called me, I think it was the police at the time, and they started, you know, the good guy and the bad guy. And they were asking me and I was answering the way I was answering, like an idiot. And they were stupid too. But each of them in a different way. So we were talking and they were asking questions like, what did I see and this and that. I didn't tell that I also hitchhiked to France and slept in the, well I'll finish the story about the cops first. They figured I wouldn't be a good collaborator, they thought I was a snitch. They figured I was too naive and stupid for that. So they basically kept me there and then they told me I couldn't tell anybody, so I told everybody. I was just such a naive idiot, because they can't tell state secrets to such a simple person, not even the smallest ones."

"We were there with the immobile Škoda and the kids were running around the car dirty. My kids are Arab, so they just looked the way they're supposed to look. And the people were like, 'Arua, arua,' like leave, leave. Like get away from the white people. That's how one mechanic took us in and we were there for, I don't know how long, like three weeks. They were trying to replace the bearing. So they were replacing it, replacing it, and when they finally did it, Honza was trying to get the car started, and it all fell apart again. And that's when I remember the lady saying, 'God wanted it. That's Allah's will, you'll stay here until you fix it.' And I wrote about it, it was called Dress for Home. Because they had daughters already ready for marriage and their mother really didn't want such a bad example as me to be there. Because the girls were watching me. They wanted me to talk to them. But they didn't need only me. They saw the TV, they already had the TV. They had pictures of France and stuff. And those were the girls who weren't allowed out of the house. That was very interesting. So I wrote about all this at the time. It was a success, by the way, the article. It was called Dress for Home. But still, the minute the things got difficult, that woman wouldn't kick us out. They really were very decent people. They helped us so much, and we managed to drive that car all the way to Algiers, the capital, where the car broke down for good. No, the car didn't break down, but the repair did break down for good, and it was near the hospital where Boumédiéne was dying."

"By and large, the Russians came. Then Palach burned himself, which was the worst thing, because it was terrible when he burned himself. It was terrible. Really terrible. When I saw his mother in the cortege, as we went for his funeral. To this day, when I talk about it, I cry. I thought it was horrible. I thought it was pointless at the time. I felt so sorry for him and everyone else. And I also expressed it on the radio, so of course I got fired. And they did the right thing, and I'm still grateful to them, to those comrades, for firing me, because, pardon my French, I didn't have to act like a whore for them during totalitarianism and during normalization. It was like, he who pays the piper calls the tune. And it was this way, this way, this way."

"There was a very important moment. When I was expecting my second child. It was not Nisan, the second child. We went to Syria and I was pregnant with Martin. Damascus was a beautiful city back then, by the way, now everything is gone. I remember that at the time I was wearing a short skirt, I think. That was at the very beginning of the pregnancy. Some guy lay down on the ground to look up my skirt. That was the first thing. But it was more like a joke. At that moment I understood that I shouldn’t be wearing short skirts. That was the first thing. And the second thing was, when I saw a woman sitting in the street. Nisan was actually a year old. I saw a woman sitting in the street with a baby and she was holding the baby in a particular way, and the baby was still very tiny. The baby’s head was falling off. I was petrified. I couldn't believe it. I was looking at it. Maybe she was just a simple villager who came to the town to buy something. She was not necessarily a beggar. She was just an ordinary woman. She was just sitting on the ground. I was so freaked out, I refused to go out. And actually, that's how my independent work for the third world started. Because up until now, I still didn't know what was going on. We had a black man on the radio, in the newsroom, but I didn't know what was happening. When I saw that woman sitting there in Damascus, at that moment I decided what my life mission would be. That moment decided it. Like I said, she wasn't a beggar."

"It was really scary because there was a famine there and we saw just, well, we were in the capital, it’s called Pyongyang, I think. And I managed to... They wouldn't even let us walk down the street. They would drive us everywhere. When we worked all day, and why we were there as interpreters. It was a conference about the peninsula. They had very good interpreters, the North Koreans, and I spoke to some of the girls there. I said, 'Why don't you do it? Why does it have to be translated to Czech first?' Because as they're interpreting, there's one main language that everybody interprets from. So there were several languages, everyone interpreting from the main language to the other ones. So we came there as Czechs, a Czech team. That means we were getting all the information through Czech. Why on earth? Why didn’t the Koreans, both North and South, interpret it in Korean? If there were some French people there, probably they were there. Well, of course there were the French and also the British, because they were interpreting into those languages. I asked the girl, 'Why don't you do it yourselves?' She was an excellent French interpreter. And she said, 'Because we're not allowed to say anything that's not written down and approved.' That means it has to be pre-written, it has to be stamped, and then she can read it. But she can't, as it was simultaneous. And she must not interpret something that has not been approved and stamped. Of course, they were spying on us. I had a bugging device in my room. I realized it afterwards."