"I was seventeen years old in the year 1968 when the Russian army came here to Bohemia. I remember that, my sister and I were just going to a dance and we said, hey, there's some kind of military exercise here, or what it is, soldiers like that. And we didn't pay attention to it, we came home, I was still in Frantovka, we went to sleep and in the morning we got up and we heard on the radio, because I was at my grandmother's and she didn't have a TV, so we heard that the soldiers had arrived and in there was much havok in Prague. So we thought it was just a game; and then we went to work and saw the soldiers again. But I would say that it was not as violent here as it was in Prague. At the beginning we cried, we were unhappy, I was working at the spa at the time and the patients were all leaving, everyone was afraid that there would be a war and wished to see their families. I was also afraid, because it was for me..., I wrote a letter home, we didn't have telephones, nothing like that, so I wrote a letter home asking if I should come, that I wouldn't see them again if something happened."
"When our family was in Romania, the Romanians went to war with the Germans, so my father had to get recruited in the war with the Germans. And because he didn't like it anymore, he didn't want to fight with them, so he ran over to the Russians, but they thought he was a deserter, so they sent him to Siberia for seven years, nobody knew he existed, he was in that gulag for seven years. He returned after seven years, but the mother already thought that he was no longer alive, so she was pregnant with another man when he returned. Dad also suffered a lot, because when he came, the children didn't want him either, the older siblings, because the first one Ludva, still back in Romania, when he was herding a cow before they came here, he stepped on a landmine and it snapped off his leg at the age of seven. So he came home and Ludva was lying on the bed, mom was pregnant and Julka, the second born, she didn't want to go to him because she didn't know him, because when he left she was only eight months old and he came back and she was eight."
Anděla Kratochvílová was born on May 18, 1951 in Cheb as the fifth of six children. The parents came from Romania, where the two oldest siblings were also born. As a Romanian, the father had to fight in the war alongside the Germans. But he defected to the Soviets, who sent him to a gulag in Siberia for seven years. After his return, the family moved to Czechoslovakia. Anděla attended elementary school in Lázní Kynžvart and after school started working as a waitress in spa establishments, first in Františkovy, later in Mariánské Lázní. In Františkovy Lázně, she also experienced the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops. In the late 1960s, she started working at the company Kovo Velká Hleďsebe, where she met her husband. She married in 1971 and had one son. In November 1989, she joined the protests against the regime as a member of the Civic Forum. At that time, Anděla also went on strike to Mariánské Lázně. She worked at the Kovo company until 2000, when she moved to the bakeries in Klimentov. She worked there until her retirement. In 2022, she lived in Klimentov near Mariánské Lázně.
