Emilie Kozubíková

* 1940

  • "Evička painted, she loved it and was good at it. She came to me to show me. I said, 'It's amazing and beautiful.' But it wasn't enough for her. She took my hand and I had to reach for her picture. She didn't believe me when I told her how beautiful it was. She knew her stuff, she wouldn't get fooled when I said, 'You got it perfect.' No. She took my hand. She had no idea that I couldn't see what the picture looked like with my hand. But she trusted my sense of touch enough to think that if I touched the picture my praise was justified and she got it right indeed."

  • "I was about twenty years old when we went on a field trip to an institution for the blind. I almost collapsed there. Those girls could knit, crochet, read, and had radios to listen to. They had rooms where they even had bedspreads on their beds. They had dolls with strollers. When I experienced the luxury of that community and the intellectual growth of those people, I thought I was going to have a stroke. I had been against it so much, and even my mother didn't want to put me there because it was an institution. Then you find that you missed out on the opportunity for education, the community of people who could have guided you the right way. So I was brought into the marriage as an absolute dunce in everything. When I picked up a broom, my mother, who would never let me do anything, was collapsing in laughter seeing the way I held the broom."

  • "It happened to me when I was a mum. My husband and I both didn't see, and there was this one bus driver who always wanted me off the bus when he saw me. I had a ZTP/P (disability) card which meant I could have a guide. But he understood it to mean that I had to have a guide. He would always throw me off the bus for not having a guide. I couldn't wake the kids up in the morning to take me to the bus to work. Why should I? I knew my route. And hiring a guide to get me to work wasn't an option. I could never tell which bus the driver was on to avoid him. So I was always embarrassed because when I got on the bus, all the people could hear him haggling with me and throwing me off the bus, like maybe I didn't want to pay."

  • "As a child, I lived away from war, I didn't really know much about it. I spent most of my time with my grandmother in Návsí, my mother's mother who had sixteen grandchildren. I had a great time there, and when I came home I had two nannies. They both had to take care of me and they helped my mother in the shop and cooked, so they didn't have much time for me. Then my mother's sister moved into the bakery during the war. She had married a Pole, settled in Český Těšín and they had a son. But her husband also had to enlist in the Wehrmacht. So Mum's sister moved in to help Mum. And she took her son, who was born in 1940, just like me. We grew up as twins. And we used to go loitering in the bakery. We didn't see much of the war, except that the adults were terribly frightened and tense - and they passed that on to us. Because the war was terrible. Daddy had to enlist. Mummy, fortunately, did everything in the bakery with Daddy, so then she was able to be a foreman and apprentice young people. But as soon as she had trained somebody, they were taken off to war again."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Frýdek-Místek, 13.02.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 02:37:44
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
  • 2

    Frýdek-Místek, 24.02.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:27:48
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

I lost my eyesight, but my luck never left me.

Emilie Kozubíková in the latter half of the 1950s
Emilie Kozubíková in the latter half of the 1950s
zdroj: Witness's archive

Emilie Kozubíková, née Czudková, was born on 11 November 1940 in Bystřice in what was the German Reich at the time. Her father Karel Czudek was a master baker and ran a bakery and shop in Bystřice. He had to enlist in the Wehrmacht in 1941. He was sent to the Russian front and declared dead in 1943. His mother Marie took over the bakery business in Bystřice. Emilia‘s eyesight began to deteriorate at about the age of six. Due to inflammation of the retina, she gradually lost her eyesight. At the age of nineteen, she married Emil Sikora who was also blind. He lost his eyesight in an accident. Two children were born to the couple. Emilie worked as a telephone operator at the Slezan textile company in Frýdek-Místek for thirty years. She was active in the Union of the Disabled, heading the section for the blind and partially sighted. She taught Braille. She wrote several collections of poetry and pieces of fiction. She is a founding member of the Petr Bezruč Literary Club. She lived with her daughter in Frýdek-Místek in 2023.