"In the 1980s, when the economy here was slowly going downhill and the state was looking for foreign exchange wherever it could, it offered those who had emigrated and were not explicitly political that they could, what we called a ransom, buy themselves out and pay for their education. And because my brother was only an apprentice, he paid only a few hundred dollars, or just low thousands, I can't remember. And by doing that, he settled his relations with the Republic, even got an emigration passport, and then he could start coming here."
"What was interesting there was that, as it was during the totalitarian era, what made the bad blood was that... it was common for white people to have a so-called boy, i.e., a domestic helper, a servant or something like that, which was unacceptable for the communist regime. But then they found out that by not having one and not leaving part of the income to the locals, it was perceived politically negatively again from the Guinean side, then it was dealt with at some level, so then they said the other way around, yes, have one, so we had one of that local boys there to help with shopping, picking fruit and things like that."
"When there were those shops, I remember that in the dairy we used to go to get milk with a milk jug, we had a little ladle, we would measure out a litre, pour it into the jug and go home with a litre. They used to bring the milk, maybe a lot of people still remember it, like in the film by Voskovec and Werich, how they used to weigh the milk in aluminium cans, it had rubber caps, so they used to sell the milk from that, butter was cut and weighed, they had it in such huge cubes, the same for quark. And next to that was the vegetable shop, and in that one they sold cabbage from a barrel, and it was taken out, and the barrels were wooden, and they had one remarkable feature, they had a wooden lid. And the more daring boys tried to steal them, the less daring ones tried to beg it from the vendors, we didn't know if it was retuned or what, because it made beautiful shields. It was just like two strips on the arm, and you had a shield right away. For example, they used to paint Hussite chalices on it and things like that and you were ready for battle."
Miloslav Marčan was born on 23 October 1953 in Prague. His mother Ludmila was totally deployed during the war, after the revolution in 1989 she received compensation from the Czech-German Future Fund. Her father was a trained electromechanic, he worked in the Marconi company, thanks to which he was not totally deployed, because they produced transmitters that were needed by the German army. After nationalisation, Marconi became Tesla Hloubětín. The witness has many memories of a typical Prague childhood in the streets of Libeň, among a group of boys, and a childhood without electronics, but with mountains of snow and temperatures below twenty degrees. Thanks to his work, his father used to go to construction sites abroad and Miloslav Marčan accompanied him to the African country of Guinea for six months in the fifth grade. He graduated from the industrial school in Ječná Street and went on to the Czech Technical University, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, majoring in technical cybernetics. His brother emigrated to Canada and they saw each other after seven years in Bulgaria. Miloslav Marčan worked at ČKD Polovodiče until the revolution, and after the revolution and the privatization of ČKD Polovodiče he moved in 1992 to the Ministry of Trade and Industry, where he soon became the director of the Department of Informatics and was thus responsible for many of the projects of digitalization of the state administration that we take for granted today. In 2024 he was living in Prague.
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