"I'll tell you the whole thing ... There was also a city slaughterhouse and my husband, as a veterinarian, was in charge of it, of course. He found out that meat was being stolen there, that some of the employees had just taken what they could. Well, then he put a halt there. He said, "No, it won't be like this." Well, out of revenge, they called him an anti-communist agent and he was imprisoned. Instead of shutting down the thieves, they shut him down. Those were the times. I do not like remembering it."
"Instead of graduating, we went to the factory. My colleagues, my classmates, had to go to Germany to work. The girls here were saved by Mr. Sodomka, although he didn't need any extra manpower, so he took the girls anyway. That saved us the fact we didn't have to go to Germany either."
"Unfortunately, there was a gentleman here, who was a tailor and he considered himself a poet, so he asked my master music teacher that when Seifert came, that Seifert's work should be read to him. And I was the unfortunate man who had to read out loud the bollocks. So I wasn't comfortable with it, but there was nothing I could do. So we read it to him, he nodded his head and had nothing to add to it. So probably as I did not like it, being no expert in the field, he couldn't like it either."
Božena Kutálová was born on December 10, 1923 in Vysoké Mýto. She lived with her parents in the building of a local burgher brewery. She was a Girl Scout, attending ballet, taking singing and piano lessons. As a child, she met the president Masaryk. At the age of seventeen, she recited a poem to Jaroslav Seifert. During the war, Božena could not properly complete her grammar school studies, and instead of graduating, she joined, together with other classmates, the Sodomka factory in Vysoké Mýto, which produced bodywork. After the war, she studied at Charles University, where she planned to fulfill her childhood dream and study medicine. Her teacher was, among others, General Heliodor Pika. However, due to love, she did not complete her studies and, together with her lover moved to the border, where her husband performed veterinary supervision at the city slaughterhouse. Here he was accused of alleged anti-communist activity, as a result of which he spent three months in pre-trial detention in Most. At that time, the witness was expecting the birth of the first child. After a while, the family returned to Vysoké Mýto.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
