Iva´s story, Czech Republic
Iva´s family archive
“I was supposed to come home after a few months to celebrate the Christmas with my family. In the end, we didn´t see each other for six years.”
In June 1939 Iva, 14 years old Czechoslovak girl, went on a long, lonely journey through the pre-war Europe from Bratislava to the London. Thanks to a scholarship program Iva got a unique opportunity to participate in a two-year study program in the UK. Her family did not need a lot of time to accept the offer and in a few weeks Iva found herself in a train heading towards the UK. She travelled alone. At that time there were no cell phones or internet to stay in touch with her family during that journey. Iva only knew that there would be a man waiting for here in London to take here to the boarding school.
The journey was hard and difficult. The pre-war Europe was not a safe and peaceful place. Iva had to unexpectedly change trains many times and she even spent a night in a police cell in Germany, because the police officers were too afraid to let such a young girl spend a night at the train station, so they rather locked here in a cell over the night. Fortunately, in the end Iva finally arrived in London and enrolled in the boarding school as had been planned. Iva and her family believed that the girl would come back to the Czechoslovakia to celebrate Christmas together. That, however, never happened.
In September 1939 the Second World War began, and any chance for Iva and her family to spend the Christmas together quickly faded away. Due to the war her stay in the UK extended from two years to six and she did not see the Czechoslovakia and her family till the summer 1945. During these six years she had to cope with many problems and difficulties. One of them was the question of funding. Iva had the scholarship only for two years. However, her family could not support her financially after that, she had no relatives in the UK, and there was no possibility for her to go back to the Czechoslovakia in 1941. Luckily, the Czechoslovak exile government and the British Council offered her a help so she could continue her studies. During the war years she had to live and also study with the other students in the underground of the school for some time because of the German air strikes. During this time Iva also successfully passed the GCE exams and was accepted to the School of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Edinburgh.
Iva returned to Czechoslovakia after the end of the war, in summer 1945. She had left the country as a 14 year-old girl and she returned as 20 years old young woman. Planned two years of studying in a foreign country turned into six. All that without the benefits of today´s world. No cell phones, no internet, no Skype. The only way to communicate with her family was through letters delivered by the Red Cross. The number of words was limited and the letters were delivered once in a few months. After her return to the Czechoslovakia, Iva enrolled in the university in Brno and successful obtained her degree. Just in time. After the change of regime in 1948 her stay in the UK became for Iva pretty problematic part of her history. The communist regime considered her to be undesirable and was causing her troubles to find a job. Firstly, she was working in a brewery. Then she was a teacher in a border region and finally she became, also thanks to her perfect language skills, a translator and journalist for foreign newspapers.
Text: Sarka Ostadalova
