Věra Snabl

"There was a headmistress in my high school, she might have been forty-five, fifty, and she was very much in love with Russia and trusted everything. A dyed-in-the-wool communist, in love with Russian communism. At the beginning of the school year she would come to every class to welcome us: 'The school year is beginning today, welcome' and so on. Of course we all stood and listened. My mother had brought me Brooklyn chewing gum, bubble gum, from Paris or wherever. It was absolutely not available here, it was bourgeois stuff. It was a packet of five gums in it. They were thin, like this thin, five of them. I took one of the five I had in my pocket that day. I don't know what came over me. When the headmistress was having her welcome speech, I took one out of my pocket and sniffed it like this. She saw me, so of course she came up to me, took it out of my hand and put it over her head and turned to the whole class, all the kids, and said, 'I'm going to give it back to her when the school year is over.' Of course, I never saw it again."

"I was with my mother and brother in Romania at the Black Sea on holiday from Czechia. My father had been in England for four years and was working with the BBC in the Czechoslovak section in London. The BBC was broadcasting in Czech to Czechoslovakia. When you managed to tune in to it, everybody was trying to find out what was going on abroad. So he was working for the BBC, and when we me, my mother and my brother flew to Romania to the Black Sea, it was the first time I saw the sea. There were so many Czechs. A few days in, we were having breakfast in the hotel garden, and when we went back to the hotel, it was strange, people were upset, and we were asking, 'What happened, what happened'. They told us there were tanks in Prague, probably the Russians had come. We said, no way. I remember my mother saying, 'Come on, it's not possible.' Bohouš 'Bobík' Musil was in touch with Dubček and those close to Dubček I think. He had a secret meeting with Brezhnev, and Brezhnev guaranteed that he would absolutely not intervene against this development in Czechoslovakia. So we thought it was not possible, we were sure it was not possible. Unfortunately, it was. We went back to the hotel and there was a huge lobby and with these couches all around and in the middle there was a radio. It was tuned to the BBC and I heard my father's voice saying, 'Today, August 21, Czechoslovakia was occupied by the Soviet brothers...' It was very emotional."

"We stayed upstairs in the synagogue, on the first floor, as I said. There was this big balcony for women on the right and stuff. It was very cold there, very cold. To the left there was this anteroom, on the right side a rather small room, but very nice, where daddy had a study, then three steps to the left, down, there was a big room, 20-25 meters, and that's where we lived, that's where we slept. My mother had it divided by bookshelves, that was my room, the living room, and there was also a corner bench, a table, and that's where we practically lived. It was very cozy, my mother was very gifted at decorating."

"It was a bit of an adventure. Dad said in other interviews he'd done that it was presented to them as an adventure. 'You are going to England. It's going to be fine, it's going to be a nice holiday' and so on and so forth. He didn't believe it much since he saw what was going on, more or less. He said that when he opened the suitcase afterwards in England, it confirmed he wasn't likely going to be going back anytime soon because there were clothes for a bigger kid, two or three years down the line. My mother reckoned he would grow, so she put clothes in there for a couple of years ahead."