Story:

From the point of view of the regime, our family was denigrated also because of the fact that we used to go to church. When I wanted to study at a grammar school and then study medicine, they did not recommend me. I could only study at a medical high school. Deciding on whether to emigrate was very difficult for me because I had a very sick mother. But my relatives agreed to take care of her. At the time of my departure, I was five months pregnant. Another obstacle we had to overcome was the lack of knowledge of the language as I started learning German only a few months before the journey. I got a little Czech-German dictionary that we took with us. When I had to go to the hospital in Vienna shortly after arriving, it was a big problem to communicate with the doctors. The communists tried to make our life uncomfortable even abroad – they sent a false statement to Vienna that I had stolen five hundred pieces of bed linen in Prague when working as a nurse and that that was the reason for our escape.

Naďa Malášková