"Then basically nothing special happened at school. The teachers taught the way they taught, telling us what they had told us before. But we knew that slowly, not right in 1948, but then in 1949 or 1950, suddenly the children's magazines we began to change. Some of them stopped getting published completely. The first thing to observe was Junák coming out and going forward. We bought it, like every week, when it came out, because there were series, comics… So the first comics disappeared, like the American ones, because we had to save money; there was no money for it, so it disappeared. So, for example, the series 'Roy and His Beavers', which was about American Boy Scouts, disappeared first, I think. Of course, what were those funny comics like that, I think he was there in some magazines, I won't tell you exactly, Peppe the sailor was coming out in the form of a comic, so of course it also disappeared. For some time The Fast Arrows persisted. I don't know what year, but then it started to get spoilled. And it was recognized by the fact that the clouds they were talking about were not allowed to be in the individual pictures. The text that the characters said must have been next to or below it. Because it was just too undesirable. It felt like an imperialist ideology or something."
"I have to tell you, like those engineers who were there, they behaved very well. It was not the case that they would take a house there without their permission, or that they would go to cook in people's kitchens. There was nothing like that, I don't know exactly where they ate, but I know, I saw them when they had lunch there, that they had boxes, they just sat there on… by those cars, they ate there, cleaned everything and didn't sleep in those civilian ones… civil houses. Because they had to guard it, of course there were patrols, they needed to wash in the morning, so they agreed with their grandfather that they went… because he didn't have it there - he didn't have plumbing or sewerage in the house, so there was a pump in the garden, so I know that there were always half-bodies of German soldiers washing in the morning and getting dressed. Well, I played there somewhere in the garden or in the yard, and they treated me very friendly being a small kid. I never spoke to them because I didn't speak German, but probably if I could speak German, they would speak back to me… They just behaved very, very civilized and considerate, I would say, to the civilian population."
"In the war, private cars were practically non-existent. Because the cars were taken over, when the army occupied the coutry, if they suited them. If they didn't suit them, they stayed with the owners, but they stayed in the garage, their wheels were removed, they were standing on logs. We went to the neighbors, who had such a car, to play inside the car. We went to the garage, we sat there, well, and we turned the steering wheel, which didn't have wheels because it was standing on logs. This was to prevent the tires from being damaged. And those cars couldn't drive because there was no gasoline. It was solved in such a way that a certain craftsman or a profession, especially doctors, received a special ration, but some people who were not entitled to gasoline for that ration, it simply did not exist as usual, so cars were converted to wood gas. This means that instead of the trunk at the back, a boiler was added, where the so-called wood gas was produced by distillation or dry distillation of wooden blocks from hardwood, which went into a special carburetor, and the cars was fed that way. This is how most cars that belonged to the civilian sector were also equipped for the wood gas. Only the German army had petrol, perhaps the Czech police could have something, of course firefighters had petrol and ambulances had petrol. But otherwise, private individuals could hardly drive cars."
Augustin Buš was born on September 19, 1938 in Brno, where he spent most of his life. He has many memories of the period during the Protectorate and World War II, although he was mostly of preschool age in those years. He experienced a war economy, cars running on wood gas or the operation of the ration system. He also has strong memories of the bombing of Brno by American and Soviet planes during the war, during which his parents‘ family house suffered serious damages. As a child, he sensitively perceived the moods in society - both the positive and full hopes just after the war and the negative ones associated with the use of the first atomic bomb and the growing power of the Communist Party. He was affected by school reform in the 1950s and experienced the introduction of Russian language classes at school. He graduated from college, followed by military service. During his postgraduate studies, at the end of which he obtained the title of Candidate of Sciences, he went to the United Kingdom and later worked for three years in Zambia as a veterinarian. Under socialism, he worked mainly in veterinary research laboratories, and after the Velvet Revolution he made it his dream job as a university teacher. He also worked as the Dean of the Faculty of Veterinary Hygiene and Ecology.
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