Anna Křivanová

“We gave up our legacy, as it was clear to us that we couldn’t… we wouldn’t have anything to live on. They jumped on our debts. It grew more complicated as a fortnight before my dad, his mother died. And my father didn’t manage to give up his legacy, so there were those fees from our grandmother to our dad and from our dad to other inheritors. Well and my mum said she wouldn’t give up the legacy and that her two underage children wouldn’t give up. Thank God for it, at least something they were then given back, something, after 1989. But back then it was bad, very bad. And as I say, my mum was hit severely, even her pension, low as it was, was shortened by a hundred crowns. Then her children were slowly coming of age, they were sixteen, eighteen… now what? we asked ourselves. Because when they reach their maturity, the government would take their money. Well, so my mother decided to donate the property to the government. Well, to give it to the government, that is nice. The house — OK. One of them, the one which made some money, was already seized by the socialist organisation which was based in it, they didn’t even ask. It went like: ‘Look, you had a house. Now you don’t have a house, it’s ours.’”

“I wanted to go to America, to join my sister there, because I said, well if we emigrated we might as well be together. But unfortunately, my sister… Well, in 1969 they were not interested in jobs like an accountant or a journalist. So we stayed here. They refused our request and we asked ourselves: ‘Should we look for something else or stay here? If we get asylum, we stay here, so that our daughter has some stability in her life. So that she has somewhere to start from.’ And in the autumn, in mid-September, I took her to the first grade here. Well. I came to the headmistress and her first two three words were in standard German, then she slid into a dialect. She saw incomprehension spreading across my face, I just watched her amazed, and said, ‘Kommens mit?’ She grabbed my hand and said, ‘Kommens mit?’ She took me to a classroom and explained to the teacher that the child… she already had one Czech girl there so it was not that easy… And I must say that they explained it to the children in such a way that the children saw it as their task to help the Czech girls. And even the teacher when I started working… I worked from nine to twelve, but the school finished at eleven. And what do you do with the child? Send him home alone? Her father worked, I worked. The teacher sat with my girl in the classroom, corrected homework or something like that, I rushed in and collected her. These are people I will never forget, because they have helped me so much.”