Květa Jirásková

"I remember that very well, because my dad just got us a big four-bedroom apartment and we didn't have furniture for it, so de facto we only had a bedroom and a kitchen. So we got some things from the Germans at that time - I still had the tickets hidden for a long time afterwards - dad bought some things, just from that Habrman Street as we lived in Čerťák. So he bought a piano from there, and that's why I started to learn to play it. He bought a big table there, four chairs, a round table. He didn't want anything upholstered, just things that could be washed and stuff. Then he bought a secretary from there. Just in the year of the currency reform. So he picked up the money to buy new furniture the next day. At that time, President Zápotocký said there would be no monetary reform. So dad took the money out one day, and by the next morning there was currency reform. And Dad actually lost the money. So he was angry, and because at that time Mr. Sklenička, the chairman of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, was persuading him to join the Communist Party, he took his Communist book and hit him with it, saying: "So, Vašek, here’s your book, and I’ve paid you for a lifetime." And he said, "Don’t be ridiculous, you’ve got a daughter. You’ll want her to go to school." And he replied, "I don’t care when you can rob a worker of his last penny. I saved up for furniture, and now I’ve got nothing to show for it. So here you go, and goodbye." I also had trouble getting into that teaching school."

"But it was bad during the war. There were air raids every now and then, there was a school garden and a school next door, and there was a siren. We always knew there was going to be an air raid when it was going off, so we always hid. When it was time, we used to go to the basement of the school, because after all the school was high. And when it wasn't time, and that was when the air raid on Doubravka was at 3:30 in the morning, we didn't make it because the siren was blaring and we could hear the planes flying. So we had to go to our basement. But we lived in a ground-floor house, which only had an attic and then one floor and a cellar downstairs. So we went to the cellar. Mummy still put her big sweater on me, she took a dressing gown herself, dad also took a dressing gown. Dad took the bread, we went down to the cellar. Both of my aunts and both of my uncles and my grandmother and my cousin went down there with us. Suddenly dad realized that he hadn't brought water with him, so he wanted to go back. But by then the bombs were falling, the window in the cellar flew out and the pressure pushed him down the stairs, but luckily dad was unharmed."