Eva’s book is full of inspiring stories and the talk show host also wanted to interview her mother for this, but she refused, says the presenter. “My mother is a very autonomous person, so I couldn’t convince her to be interviewed by me, so I said: ‘That’s good mom, then I’ll write about you,'” said the RTL face.
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Eva’s parents had to flee Prague at a young age because her father was in the student resistance. “He had been with my mother for two years by then,” the late-night queen continues the story. “My parents were under the impression, then 23 and 18 years old, and everyone around them – my grandparents too: they were all still alive at the time – that it would be for a few months. That they would go away ‘for a while’ and that Western Europe or the Americans came to rescue them, the Russians couldn’t possibly stay? But, as we know, that didn’t happen.”
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Her parents never went back home. They were only allowed to return legally after the fall of the wall in 1989, because they had become persona non grata. Eventually Eva’s father and mother ended up in the Netherlands, where they received a scholarship and where, according to the presenter, they were received with ‘open arms’. In the Netherlands they built a whole new life together, without their social safety net. “That made a big impression on their lives and that – as I write in the book – changed my mother forever.”
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According to the presenter, her mother has always been independent, but because she was already on her own from the age of eighteen, she developed a strong inner compass. And that has also brought the presenter further in life. She explains: “Because my mother is so independent in her thinking and acting, she has also helped me enormously by always saying to me: ‘Focus on your work, on what you do. Do it well, but don’t worry about it. what everyone thinks of you.’ If you have such a parent who says that to you, it helps enormously with all the big steps you take, which makes you dare.”
Matthijs continues is every saturday after Who is the mole?, around 9.40 pm, can be seen on NPO 1. Watch last week’s episode here back.
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