Věra Kafková

“I worked at the post office for twenty-five years, delivering post. Not sitting behind the counter... And when I was to deliver a letter with an exotic stamp, from Germany, from abroad, that was something, kind of a thrill. That lady over there, her son’s a doctor and he’s in Germany... So I wondered, I reckoned, her only son, she here a widow and her son in Germany. No one was allowed anywhere, in the beginning it was trouble just to receive a letter from abroad, that got you an entry somewhere. So it was kind of pretty exotic.”

“We all had to work in those fields! It wasn’t like we would come back from school and do whatever we wanted to. No, you go there, you go pick nettles for the geese, Grandma shooed us along, you go there and there, or join us in the field. So then we all had to work in the field. I was attending economy school at the time, for two years. In the morning, before leaving for the bus, which left at seven o’clock, at one point I’d go and feed the pigs. That’s how we had the work split up.”