Helena Samková

"I slipped there somehow, I didn't fall, but I don't know if something twitched in me or what. Then I started to feel sick, nauseous, so we slept until morning, and in the morning it was even worse. So my husband - we were naive, then - said that we would go to the airport, maybe the airline had an office there, maybe they would fly me home. But we arrived at the airport in Zurich, there was no office there, there was no plane, so we stayed at the nearest campsite to the airport, and that was in Winterthur. In the morning in the tent I was starting to get like labour pains, so he put me in the car and we drove, we came to a crossroads and he says, 'Look, on the right is the hospital, on the left is the Krankenhaus, where do you want to go?' I said, 'I like the hospital better.' So we went to the hospital, a big building, I think it was the state hospital. The Krankenhaus, that was private, but supposedly they would have taken me there too, I guess. They treated me terribly well there, they put me on a bed there, and I didn't actually get off the bed more or less until I was left to go home. Because even with the bed... At first they tried to hold the baby, but then they realised that it was impossible, I was already in labour, so they took me to the delivery room with the bed, they tore off the bottom of the bed, they put the delivery attachment in and the baby was born."

"We were in Bulgaria for two whole months for practice. We were waitresses there, serving the groups that came, the Czech groups and the Russian groups. The German groups, I mean the West German groups, the Bulgarian waiters kept those for themselves. They left us here on the lido-demo. And when it happened here in August, we didn't really know anything about it, because we only had a little radio that rattled a little bit. We just knew that we couldn't go home, that the border was closed then. The Bulgarians didn't tell us much either."