"It taught us that we were able to deal with every unpleasant situation all our lives, because we were used to living modestly, unpretentiously and making do. It paid off for me my whole life. When I got to the studies and it was the currency, it paid off for me, when I got married and we didn't have the money, we each had only the paycheck in our pocket, so I was able to cope in every situation. For this, it was wonderfully educational for children and young people. It was not 'daddy, give me, mom, give me.' For example, when I got twenty pennies for gluing a sheet, it was quite a reward."
"What does the ticket system mean? If you wanted to buy bread, you were entitled to it if you had a piece of paper - for example, two kilos for fourteen days. So if you had a ticket for it, we sold it to you. If you didn't have it, unfortunately not. We received tickets at the municipal office. Each family had a master sheet stating how many children the family had and how many adults. It was graded - children under 18 got about one more roll than adults. They went to the office every month to get tickets for the family. They were tickets for meat, flour, bread, for clothes, shoes, even for soap, milk - just about almost everything."
"All the ones with the best grades went to Podebrady to study." - "How come they decided who went to what school?" It was not divided according to the study certificate. On the contrary, we received papers from the principal - invitations to study, and we visited the families of communist children, who had bad grades from top to bottom and went to convince them how good it would be if their children received an education and enrolled them to school. We who were not allowed to go to school. That's how it went."
Emilie Černá, née Rathová, was born on February 17, 1935 in Pečky. Her father Vladimír Rath was a self-employed person, her mother Emilie was a housewife. She had an eight year younger brother. Since the witness‘s childhood, family life has revolved around a general store that the father operated in Pečky. Emilie Černá mainly remembers everyday life during the German occupation, the self-employed in Pečky, the ration system that complicated their business, and the hard work in the shop. After February 1948, the Communists deprived his father of his trade, then he worked as an assistant in Jednota. Due to her so-called bourgeois origins, Emilie had trouble studying, even though her study results were excellent.
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