Zora Novická

"I went to Stuttgart in 1967, because I wanted to do mineralogy, petrography and then move on to gemmology. Well, do you know what gemmology is? It is the science of precious stones. Then I actually started studying there at the university, but in 1968 the so-called Warsaw Pact troops broke in. I thought I already had a diploma, that I would study there, but my mother kept writing me desperate letters. She was terribly afraid, she remembered the persecutions we experienced under the communists, it wasn't funny at all. That night, for example, ten soldiers broke in there, put us against the wall, and now they have turned the whole house upside down. God knows what they were looking for. So my mother was scared and wrote to me, 'My sister was kicked out of college, and I don't want to experience it again.' So I came back in 1969, finished my thesis, graduated from university and in 1970 I started working at the uranium research.”