Life in Czechoslovakia was easier when it was part of the Eastern Bloc. I don’t mean better or nicer, I mean easier. It’s hard to do your thinking and make your choices — the communist regime relieved you of this hardship and decided all things for you. The citizen had only one dilemma to crack: whether to stay on the safe side of conformism or take the risky path of dissent.

My parents’ opinions on this subject differed. My mother’s loyalty lay foremost with my brother and me. Any act of defiance against the regime could mean that your children won’t have access to higher education and will be placed in a vocational school. There is no need to emphasise that dissenting adults risked permanent demotion, labour camp or imprisonment. My mother was surely not keen on losing her decent secretarial job, but more than that, she was trying to secure the best chances for her children. She clearly couldn’t afford any heroic anti-establishment actions. The Eastern Bloc collapsed before the success of her tactics could be put to test. It was only after the revolution that my brother called it a day after secondary school and that I earned a college degree.

In 1989, the year of the overthrow of the communist government, my father was employed in a construction job in the capital city. To my mother’s dismay, he was increasingly busy attending anti-government demonstrations instead of building the underground transport system. My mother must have been paralysed by anger and fear. My father was on the spot when the Velvet Revolution was happening and peaceful protesters gathered on the capital city’s main square to jingle their keys. After the revolution, my father set up a small business — private businesses were impossible under communism — and went on to become a moderate success. My mother joined him in the family business when the company she worked at was privatised, the production was cut down and she lost her job.

Despite its major limitations, the Eastern Bloc was a stable environment to bring up your children in. I hated being a child because the discipline in the kindergarten was rigid, but I felt safe because of the accustomed uniformity of everything. The furniture and the toys in the kindergarten were the exact same as at my home — there were no other choices. Though there were no uniforms worn at any level of education, everyone looked as if they were wearing one. Kindergarten children wore the most awful kind of either blue or beige thick tights and cotton turtlenecks in several available colours. Everyone had the same — little to nothing — and everyone was equally miserable. Yet, we often lived in a strange peace of mind — call it resignation — because there was nothing else one person could do.