Danuše Nerudová, economist, rector of Mendel University
September 11th was a day when my husband and I were celebrating in our first apartment, then as university students, that we had started living together and flew out of our parents’ nest. As I was getting ready, I was watching TV and suddenly I saw burning “twins” and my head flashed at what another catastrophic film was. It wasn’t until a while later that I found out it was live from New York, and I immediately switched to CNN. Friends came, but there was no celebration, we all discussed whether there would be a war and an oil crisis.
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My husband’s parents were on holiday in Croatia at the time, and we even called for them to refuel with a full tank of petrol and return to the Czech Republic quickly.
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Michal Stehlík, historian and pedagogue, Faculty of Arts, Charles University
September 11, 2001 belongs to the category of historical data for which a memory map of the type “where I was when I was” applies – for example, the assassination of JFK in the United States or our memory of the morning of August 21, 1968.
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I remember the “twins” exactly. At the time of my twenty-five-year-old, I was an official of the Department of Culture, sitting in the Trade Fair Palace, and a colleague wrote in an e-mail – “Look at the news, America!” – I thought it was a virtual reality for a while, about a real attack.
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And on September 11, I have one memory exactly a year after, when I boarded a plane for Paris and everyone had an open newspaper with headlines – “Exactly a year ago!”, Which was not a completely pleasant feeling… “
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Historian Michal Stehlík and economist Danuše Nerudová
Photo: goldfinch, non-metallic, Law
Jiří Grygar, astronomer and astrophysicist, Institute of Physics AS CR
I learned about the attack when I took a tram from the National Theater to Smetana’s embankment. I have the impression that it was around 3 p.m. I was listening to a small radio in the tram and suddenly I heard the excited voice of Czech Radio editor Jan Petránek in my headphones, who described in a very factual way what was happening in New York during the attack on the first “twin”.
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Therefore, I got off the tram right next to Rudolfinum, sat on a bench by the Vltava and started hunting stations, which after a certain pause also reported on the second attack.
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Václav Hořejší, immunologist, Institute of Molecular Genetics AS CR
I was just writing a scientific article, and one of our students was announcing it out loud in the hallway. I thought it was an air accident.
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