Irina Juřinová

"I really felt the need to tell it to someone highly ranked. You can imagine that I wrote him how much I respected him and so on... But also that the arrival of Soviet troops wouldn't improve the situation - to the contrary, which was true. I was like - when in came to Czechoslovakia for the first time, people were waving like this out in the fields and now this?"

“Whoever was able and still had strength brought their dead relatives to the cemetery. Dad’s factory nailed us together a wooden coffin. So we put my dad on a sledge – every Russian family up north has one – and brought him there on foot. We had those food stamps for January with us. There, we found some clerk along huge, wide ditches, some 10 meters broad and 25 meters wide – several of these in a row. I could see cars driving in and dumping the completely frost bodies into these ditches.”

„I was on a business trip to East Germany with the head of our pedagogy department. A German man invited me to dance. I went to dance with him but I held a stiff posture. I just couldn’t get it out of my head: ‚Who are you dancing with? Oh God, who are you dancing with?‘ It was deep inside me even if I couldn’t have presented it publicly there. It was really terrible, you see. Even though Germans were normal people and he himself was probably also just a kid during the war – that man. But it was so deep inside me, you see? As if it were a sin for me to dance with this German guy.“