Claire le Bris-Cep, France

It is summertime and I’m thirteen years old. We are in Sologne where my parents have rented out a summer house. My brother has recently returned from my father’s native country. He was the first member of our family to set out on a fact-finding mission to meet our five uncles and aunts and our 15 nephews and nieces. The four of us were seriously thinking about all moving back to Czechoslovakia in a year’s time.

In the days when my father lived there he was a well-known writer. He was not what you’d call politically active, but his literary work bore the stamp of his Catholic faith and also his contacts with western intellectuals which the communist regime frowned upon. To avoid being sent to prison he fled the country in secret, getting safely across the barbed wire. His mother died years later in Moravia without him ever getting the chance to see her again.

After 20 years of exile came the first ray of hope: the situation in Czechoslovakia had slowly begun to improve. My father found it hard to believe, but the rest of us were already imagining how we would all go back to Myslechovice and reunite with his brothers and sisters.

That morning I got up as usual and went to have breakfast with my parents. But nothing was as it should be. Something serious had happened, though I had no idea what it was. My mother’s eyes were red with weeping, and she was hiding a crumpled hankie in her hand. My father sat there hunched over, head bent, clearly wanting to be left alone. And what was most unusual was that the radio was on so early in the morning. I didn’t understand, I did not want to understand the words that were coming out of the radio receiver, filling the room and taking possession of our lives. They were talking about tanks, Russian soldiers, an invasion. They were talking about people taking to the streets in Prague and building barricades. They were talking about people being killed.

Slowly I realized that my father would never be able to return to his native land. It was the morning of August 21st, 1968.

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