Emilie Hukaufová

"At that time the Helsinki Accords were in force, but the passport office was up on Letná Street, and when I went there there was a clerk named Holoubek who made me wait for twenty minutes, whether he was drinking coffee or what, I don't know. When I came out, all the people said, 'Please, what were you doing there?' I said, 'Ask Mr. Holoubek.' Once, I got an offer—a colleague of mine had a son in the Netherlands, and they were traveling there by car. And I said, 'I'll have the travel permit ready,' so I went there, I begged him very hard to give me the travel permit sooner than in thirty days, that I could go there by car, to Holland. And he went in there, and he pulled it out in front of me, and I saw that he was holding the pemit in his hand, then he put it back in and said, 'We have thirty days to process it,' and he didn't give it to me. Or he made me wait there, and when I complained that he was being so hostile to me, he said, 'You don't have to go anywhere either,' and I said, 'What about the Helsinki Accords?' He says, 'Go to hell with them.'"

"And I also experienced a raid on Vysočany. At that time, my uncle from Budějovice was visiting us and brought us a piece of meat. And my cousin cooked the meat and I was playing the piano. We were just waiting for my cousin to call and tell us that everything was on the table. And all of a sudden it was going, ooh, ooh, and we didn't pay attention, and boom, a huge bang. It started falling on Vysočany. So we grabbed, there were stockings, my cousin had washed them, so we grabbed the stockings and ran to the cellar. And there I was really praying, because one minute the house next to us got full hit and it blew all through the foundation towards us. We couldn't breathe at all, it was completely dark in that basement. And it was lucky that we had the stockings and there was water, so we put the stockings on faces and we breathed through that. And when we came out, it was a picture of destruction, because there was a distillery across the street. We lived near Palmovka and there was a distillery opposite, it was bombed out. Vysočany. The house next to us, only the front façade was left standing, as we sometimes see it in the film, so you could see it. And I was affected by waking up at night with horror. Or I didn't wake up, I went to the window, I opened the window and I wanted to jump out because I thought I was in this house that was going to collapse. Next to us."