"It was such a deep regret. The situation was such for the man who handled it this way. Not that he was solving it for himself, he was solving it for us too. And it was painful. Apparently, all the peers, even those a little older, we may have felt guilty about not doing something. That we lived just like that and climbed the mountains."
"Although I was humanistically oriented on the one hand, it was clear to me that this is not the way. Because my father was a foreign soldier on the Western Front, who had had terrible problems with it until then. Really, but not by arresting him down again. But his existence was not good." - "Did you feel the supervision of the street committees?" - "It was difficult, they came to us sometimes. I even remember that once the cops rang the bell here, it was in the early fifties. And they told my mother if she knew about it, that her husband had crossed the border illegally at noon today, and that he had been detained. And my mom was amazing because she said, 'No, that's not true!' And they said: 'It's true, today your husband...' And my mother didn't let them catch her, so they left, and it wasn't true, of course. Well, that's what she sometimes had to dealt with."
"They sold everything here, they gave the money to someone. Apparently, they were covered by the Germans, otherwise I can't imagine it, and it was supposed to be a trip to Mauritius. But it was a big transport, I'd say several thousand people. And they left Bratislava on the Danube by boat, into the Danube delta and there they switched to an overseas cargo ship, which normally carried coal. So, there were terrible conditions. And they lived there on the decks, there were married couples and single people, and the men there made such cubicles out of wooden slats, so the individual people had their place there. But normally it was a cargo ship, they carried coal there below decks, and it took several months."
Eva Vavroušková, née Mannheimerová, was born on September 13, 1940 in Jerusalem. Her father Vilém Mannheimer was of Jewish origin. Her mother Růžena, called Věra, converted to the Jewish faith. In 1939, the parents managed to escape from the Nazis from persecution from the protectorate. Her father joined the British army, fighting at Tobruk and Dunkirk. The family returned to Czechoslovakia after the war, they met again in 1946 in Prague. Eva started going to school in Prague and in 1958 she graduated from the eleven grades school. She wanted to study the humanities, but it did not go together with her family background, the witness began studying technology and in 1964 she graduated as a mechanical engineer at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the Czech Technical University. She married Ladislav Mlčouch and they both fell in love with climbing. The young couple had a daughter, Kateřina, in 1962. In the 1960s, Eva worked in Tesla Holešovice, where she was one of the first Czechs to work with a computer. In 1968, she was hit by a tragedy when her husband Ladislav Mlčouch tragically died while climbing Mont Blanc. Eva remarried in 1973, she married Josef Vavroušek. A year later, their daughter Petra was born. After maternity leave, she worked at the Tesla General Directorate, then at the Pivovary a Sladovny concern. The family interacted with Chartists, such as Jiří Müller. Her husband Josef Vavroušek was involved in the Civic Forum from the very beginning and became the Minister of the Environment. In the spring of 1995, her husband Josef and younger daughter Petra died tragically in the Parichvost valley in the Western Tatras. Today, Eva Vavroušková lives in Prague and is still involved in the environmentally oriented Society for Sustainable Living.
