Was she frightened then? With startling suddenness, the tough, professional facade crumples and her eyes swim. She was terrified, she says, because she was old enough to remember 1968.
"I was only 20 in 1968 and from the day I was born, I had been told that the Russians were my friends, the people I could trust. And suddenly Russians were invading my city with tanks and shooting at us. And I realised that I had been lied to all my life." The physical threat was real. As a nurse, she worked frantically at the point of automatic weapons, to resuscitate a 27-year-old Russian soldier who subsequently died because blood supplies were inaccessible due to the violence. They were accused of letting him die. The physical terror, however, was secondary to the betrayal of the invasion itself: "My faith was broken," she says hoarsely. For her, that was the end.
Six thousand nurses lost their jobs following the changeover, and those remaining endure appalling pay and conditions, but Magdalena Hadacova has no regrets. "Yes, we had security and certainty and free health care before, but at what price? We paid for it with our freedom, with high pollution, with bad working conditions, with environmental damage - which are all being addressed now. People complain a lot now and say `OK we have freedom of speech but no money'. But they don't realise that if nothing had changed, they couldn't even say that. They would have been put in prison. This is common to all these countries. This is the transition and must be endured."
The trouble is that experiences like Magdalena's are being erased from the collective memory. Even some who loathed the system and worked against it, even the most successful, pro-Western, young intellectuals can slip easily into happy reverie when asked about the old days.
Peter Davorec, the 29-year-old university lecturer-cum-advertising director, remembers having "a lot, a lot, a lot of time . . . Time for friends and to read really big books. Everyone had an average salary and did nothing for it. It wasn't necessary to have a second job or to work 16-hour days. It wasn't possible to have more money so no one even tried. Life was pretty enough, with ham for supper and meat for dinner. OK, we had to queue five hours for bananas, or toilet paper or salt or butter. Everything had a season and the queuing was my job. And it was pretty cheap. I went to London in 1990 and I was shocked to find students there like me who had no money for beer. I had thought that Western countries were really rich and that students would certainly have money for two beers. The shock was that living standards were not so different."
His plan is to save enough money from the advertising work to support his lecturing full-time - which he describes as his "hobby", because of the risible pay - in 10 years. He has no doubt that he can do it.
Meanwhile, the thrusting young are growing a little irritable with the old and the disillusioned. In different countries, someone usually refers to the national capacity for complaint. "There is a saying in Hungary that Hungarians complain `even when the cart is going right' ", says a young woman on a reasonable foreign salary.
In terms of national economics, apart from the former USSR and basket cases like Bulgaria and Romania, the cart is certainly steady enough. Stringent EU entry requirements are seeing to that and they desperately want the EU. But meanwhile, small and large psychological wars are being fought for the soul of each country. A common metaphor in the region is that while you can turn an aquarium into fish soup, reversing the process presents more of a challenge. The aquarium is still opaque. Far from slinking away, the Communists' tails are up. Major Zeman is a case in point.
Czech TV's decision to start re-screening an old 1970s police series called Thirty Cases of Major Zeman has stirred a huge debate. This is because the "Zeman" cases, though based on true stories, were resoundingly skewed for propaganda purposes to represent the goodies as the communists (action man Zeman, crusader for truth, justice and the communist way) and the baddies as the dissidents (e.g. drugs dealers demanding to be treated as political prisoners).
Time magazine reports that the biggest outcry has come from the Czech Confederation of Political Prisoners. (This is a country where as many as 280,000 people were tried and convicted on political grounds, with many getting terms exceeding 15 years). They have filed a criminal complaint on the grounds that the series promotes "repression of citizens' rights and freedoms" and spreads hatred. "This is not about censorship," the magazine quotes the confederation's chairman, who himself spent 13 years in prison. "Germany also wouldn't broadcast films portraying members of the Gestapo as heroes."
However, a survey by the respected public TV station - which has aired debates before and after each part to provide context - shows that nearly 80 per cent of all viewers wants the dashing Major to continue his ideological crusade despite decidedly dodgy dialogue and rotten special effects. "If people can watch Dallas why not Major Zeman?" asked the deputy chairman of the Communist Party, sworn to change the republic's course from capitalism to socialism. "Both represent a certain ideology."
The genial politician in Prague referred to at the beginning of this article may soon be looking to build a wall around more than the Romanies.
For full reports as the series runs, contact www.ireland.com