Jana Kociánová

“I dreamt of playing tennis and I even think I wouldn’t have been bad at it. But to come to my mummy and ask her to buy me a racket – she’d chase me around with a wooden spoon. So I saved money. When mummy couldn’t make us bread with grease she gave us 30 hellers for a roll. I saved these coins, bought a ping-pong paddle for fifteen crowns and went to see Mr. Karlík, telling him I wanted to do ping pong. Which had happened. So I had been doing it ever since I was fourteen up until five years ago. I still have a number of medals from the veterans’ tournaments. Ping pong requires daily training. But most of all – given that we hadn’t even had running water at home, let alone a bathroom – the tournaments and all meant that every weekend we’d go play a match where there were showers and all the luxury.”

“I got waken up by a loud thunder. It was tanks driving on cobblestones. I thought: ‘Well, they’re making another WW II movie,’ because I encountered that in the past. But there were many of them, a whole convoy. So I thought what was happening? And then people were running around and even us who hadn’t had a radio got the news what was going on. I was completely shocked. I rushed out and went to work on foot. Now I had to cross the bridge to Resslova street but it was blocked by tanks. They told me: ‘You won’t pass here, this is closed.’ I had already walked far to get there and as I said, I am a rebel. So I went to one of the tanks and said: ‘I’m crossing the bridge to the other side and don’t tell me I’m not. I need to go to work.’ I knew Russian very well and unfortunately made use of it. I even started to call them dogs – using very inappropriate words. At first, I was amicable: ‘Who gave you such orders? Do you know why you are here? Are you just blindly obeying who-knows-who’s orders? What is the trouble with me crossing to the other side?!’ Then it escalated to calling them names. He pulled out his assault rifle which appeared 50 cm from my face. The crowd pulled me towards the ground and the soldier himself got scared. Those boys, they were greenhorns, not knowing where they were and what was going on. But for me, that was a catastrophic moment, of course.”

“The other time someone asked me what was worst about this period of time and I told them – as I am telling you now – that it wasn’t fear, but rather the stress. A permanent stress of remaining undercover, up until the last moment. That was the worst thing about that era. Because the other things we could sort out by organizing private, closed parties. Back then, people hadn’t rushed after money the way they do today and everyone had the same regardless of what they did. So we lived our amazing private lives during the parties – of course with the curtains drawn. Nobody was hiding anything there, and there was no way anything would become an issue.”