Gwendolyn Albert

"It's like a group of people who have gotten together before. It was disturbing in a way. And I remember when we were leaving, there was a weird moment. They had a sound system - a microphone, speakers - and when it was over, whoever was operating the sound system suddenly turned on the radio. So all of a sudden this modern music - I think it was Phil Collins, some horrible pop music - came through the space. And it was weird. We all understood that we were expected to leave now. So why disturb all the words and all the seriousness like that? It was very rude. And I just became all the more interested in who the Roma people actually are."

"When I first came here, there were no ads in the first place. Which is almost unbelievable for a person from a consumer society. And secondly, if anything was already hanging in the public space, it was communist material - with a red star... pinned on a cork board behind glass, in a locked display case. So when people said, 'Okay, now we're going to be free, we're going to say what we want,' and they started writing all these posters, it was like a bomb went off. Every available public space was covered with these great posters, happy, happy things. I remember down in the subway, somebody installed a roll of toilet paper and wrote the names of all the Communist officials on each scrap. This explosion of creativity, that was another thing that made it so captivating. There was no uniformity: now we're all lining up behind one slogan... Individual people were handwriting their individual messages on paper and hanging it everywhere. Because they finally could, and because they realized that if we all did it - we wouldn't all get arrested."

"They were just days unlike anything I've ever experienced. The feeling of solidarity in the crowd and among the people! The way things were brilliantly organised - the fact that ambulances could drive through the crowd to someone who had perhaps fainted. There was just an incredible sense of solidarity... That you were in the middle of a huge crowd where people were very careful not to step on anyone's foot. Everybody was very considerate of each other. It wasn't really a crowd. It was a real gathering of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people. So it was just an experience I'll probably never have again. It really changed my life."

"There was one moment I will never forget. We were on a tram, a twenty-two, it was summer, very hot - and for some reason the tram just stopped in the middle of its usual uphill journey. And absolutely nobody said anything! No announcement: 'Sorry, we had to stop for some reason...' Nobody said anything, nobody looked at anybody, nobody asked any questions, nobody was impatient. Everybody just stood and waited for the tram to start again. At first, when it took only a few minutes, I thought, 'These people are really patient. It's amazing to see such patient people!' Because where I'm from, people would immediately start complaining. Then, when it had gone on for ten minutes - ten minutes is a long time when you don't know what's going on - after those ten minutes, when everybody was just standing there in silence, I started to realize that there was a kind of unspoken prohibition against asking why we had stopped. Which I didn't feel, but everyone around me did. And it was clear that this was not something to be broken. And I would say there was an anxiety that was growing in that crowd. But everybody held it in. That was the first moment that I started to understand that it's expected... that people are taught that they have to control themselves in that society."