Hana Lobkowiczová

“Me and my future husband used to walk together from school towards Jirásek bridge, side by side. Already in the fourth year of grammar school, incredible. But it was a different sort of dating than what we see today. It was really purely platonic. We would give each other looks and so on.” – “Did you know about his family? Or was it spontaneous?” – “Of course, I knew it because of his name. But he was immensely humble. His mother, my future mother-in-law, was a widow and they had no money. All of us kids ate bread with some spread on it. But he would always eat bread with tomato paste because they had no money to buy anything fancier. It was impossible to buy butter at that time; one had to get it at the black market or something. He was really incredibly humble. He never bragged about anything, let alone about him being a Lobkowicz.”

“I knew I didn’t have a choice. There was no way, the assignment was automatic. Not only to Eastern Slovakia where the ‘unwanted people’ were commonly sent. So I knew that I would be sent somewhere. And in the end, Ústí was more manageable than Eastern Slovakia. I started in there on 1 January 1953. They assigned me to the isolation ward. I had to examine the patients. Back then, people still suffered from palsy and meningitis. I had to learn to examine spine functions and similar things. I worked from seven to twelve in there. And at 1 p.m. my other shift began at the district clinic. I would work there every day from one p.m. to seven p.m. On Saturdays we worked until one. At noon, the whole Ústí nad Labem got up to catch a train and go to Prague. Luckily there was the so-called ‘Berliner’ – a direct express Berlin-Vienna. The whole train was full of doctors. And on Sunday at noon we had to be on our way back, reporting at work again.”