Miroslav Hůla

"By that time, the print shop had been cleaned out, nothing was going on there. The printing machines remained there, but he [the soldier] had seized a bicycle somewhere, or someone had given it to him, and he wanted to have it sent to Russia. Somehow, we argued, well, the Slavic language... with the help of our hands we made ourselves understood. I wasn't there, but my mother told me. He brought a bicycle there, and if he could hide it, until he could send the mail, the package, to Russia. They talked about all sorts of things and he asked if the print shop and the house were hers, like mom's. He was thinking and saying the future vision: that [mom] would suffer a lot before she loses everything. That's what it sounded like, his assessment of the situation, where this republic of ours might end up after that."

"When the printer closed down and the machines were scrapped, all that was left was that they sent the family money for the iron as compensation. The result was that my mother went and bought a chain of sausages with the money and we ate those in one dinner. That was the end of the whole printing business. This is how my mother presented it: Now you've spent the printer on food!'"

"Someone has figured out that one printer is unnecessary in Humpolec and there doesn't have to be any. The broke up the machines, they were collected and the Type metal that could be used was taken to a printing plant in Havlíčkův Brod. Dad didn't even go to the printing house in [Havlíčkův] Brod anymore, they gave him a job at a metal factory, he was a kind of clerk and did all kinds of things: taking orders, issuing invoices and other things. He went there for about a year or two and the wrongs or maybe something else... he just lost his mind and he kicked the bucket. My dad wasn't home for about three days, my brother was already in the military service, so my mom borrowed my brother's motorcycle and we went to find my dad to see if he had gone to see my brother in the service. We looked for him and three days later they found him hanging in Ledeč nad Sázavou at an outlook. My mother put it together again, saying that they had been there on a Sokol trip and that he liked it there."

"After that apprenticeship, we had... my grandmother had a little stationery store or a bookstore. But my grandmother was getting old and I simply was to to finish it. But the private business was being liquidated in those days, I think, also in the way that just those shopkeepers weren't getting any goods. That is, they sold what was on the shelves, and so you just normally had to close down and go work somewhere. That's what happened to me. So, in the meantime, they nationalized my father's print shop, and there was a shop next to that. It was closed down, the goods were taken to a shed somewhere behind the house, then they were put into waste, because there was nowhere to put them. And things like that. Due to this, I had to start looking for a job."

"I'm already a pretty good witness, I'll be 86 years old in the autumn. So, I still remember something, as they say, from the First Republic. I still remember the last two years of the war, I remember the Germans here. During the war I started going to school, it was called first grade then, an evangelical school. So, I got to those final years. I could tell you it wasn't any easier during the war either. As boys and as pupils... we were more or less fine in those days. Because the Germans gradually took over the schools here and made barracks out of it, and again we had to study only in some auxiliary premises, like the canteen of a factory. The cantor came once a week and gave us some homework for the next week, and that was the end of the school. After the war, things started to get kind of normal. It was practically by 1948, when I was about to finish regular schooling, that Victorious February, as it's called today, came. It started so gradually, that was when I was supposed to go into apprenticeship, I was supposed to apprentice myself maybe with my parents because my dad had a printing press, and I was supposed to start as a printer of some sort. But there were all sorts of restrictions already, so that the children of these parents couldn't do what the parents wanted to them do, or what the children wanted to do. So, I didn't get to do that. Eventually, my parents sort of arranged it with somebody, so I was able to train as a sales consultant."