IVAN

I was born in Slovakia, in the village of Zvolenska Slatina, which is in central Slovakia. Perhaps I should explain that my grandmother lived there. At the time of my birth, we lived in Bzenec, in southern Moravia. It was the tradition in my mother's family that the daughters would come back home and give birth to the children at the place where they were born. My mother went there for my birth and my sisters' births.

My nationality is Canadian now, but I am half Czech and half Slovak. My mother comes from a Slovak family and she was born in Slovakia. She attended schools in Slovakia and went to a convent school in Liberec, in northern Bohemia. And my father, typically Czech, was born in Vienna. I have a Czech education and am a citizen of the Czech Republic, as I found out about two years ago, to my surprise. Later, under the new Czech Citizenship Act, I became a citizen of Slovakia. Change is life.

MARTA

My background is simpler than his. I was born in Zlin. It was renamed Gottwaldov during the communist regime. Now again it is Zlin. And I am Czech.

IVAN

My father had a drugstore in the small Moravian town of Bzenec. It is a wine-growing region. During the crisis in the thirties, he went bankrupt. He then applied for a job in Zlin at Bata, the shoemakers. He became a manager in a huge department store's electrical appliance department, so we moved from southern Moravia to central-eastern Moravia.

I received my education in Zlin. We also lived for seven years in Litovel, which is in northern Moravia. We moved there because we could not get an apartment in Zlin; at that time-there was a shortage of apartments. A company in Litovel offered me a position and a company apartment - that's why we moved there.

MARTA

I lived in Zlin until we married. There was a real shortage of housing in communist Czechoslovakia. We lived in my parents' house and later at his mother's place. And then we got an apartment in Litovel, another town, and he got a job there. Four of our children were born in Zlin and the last child born in Czechoslovakia was born in Olomouc because the maternity hospital was there. Litovel was a small town of 5,000 to 8,000 people, so there was no hospital there, only a health clinic.

IVAN

The first time that we went there, we went by train. Zlin, where we grew up, is surrounded by mountains. Litovel is just flat. There was a cemetery in Litovel, and I used to say to myself "I hope that this is not the cemetery where I am going to be buried." We moved there after much hesitation only because there was no hope of getting an apartment in Zlin. There I worked for a research institute in a patent department. We had been promised that they would allocate us an apartment, but when one became available, they said, "Later, later, later." There always happened to be a member of the Communist Party who got the priority. So eventually we decided that we had to go and we went, but we never called Litovel home, really. We felt at home in Zlin. With a friend of ours who lived in the same apartment as we did in Litovel, we purchased one of the cottages from the exhibition in Olomouc. It was one of the great worldly possessions for us. We moved it to the Jesenik mountains in northern Moravia shortly before we left.

We had four children then. Our third child was born shortly before we moved to Litovel. And then we had two more children in Litovel, so we did not have money flowing out of our ears.