Hermína Petrželová

"My mother, who was already over seventy at the time, was told that she could not receive a pension. She was told that she had three children, who could take care of her. She truly didn’t get anything at all. When my father died in the hospital in Kolín, she was penniless. That's when I got up and went to the town hall. I told them to be ashamed of themselves that my mother had lived there for over fifty years, and that she had not lied around, she had worked - and they were not able to give her a single Crown. I told them that we don't need them to tell us to take care of her. Mom had arrived at the town hall using two crutches. She couldn’t walk very well and said: 'How would you feel? If I had no children, I would stand here naked and hungry.' I told them that I live in Ostrava. When I said that, I was told that if I move my mother to Ostrava, she would receive the lowest possible pension, that they would give it to her there. I didn't have the heart to rip my mother away from where she had lived all her life. Me and my two brothers would rather take care of her."

"When I was coming back from school, a small plane suddenly appeared. Usually a black man sat in it. He would fly in front of the train whenever it was outside the station. He tilted the plane’s wings, which was a signal for the train driver to stop. The sensible driver stopped. We got off the train, lay down on one side behind the embankment, he flew in from the other side and shot the locomotive to pieces, so that the train could not reach the front. Once, a plane chased him all the way from Prague. He rushed to the station, just outside Poděbrady, where the Cidlina flows into the Elbe. He was already running out of gas before he reached Libice, and he was getting annoyed, so he hit a locomotive and three coaches got the worst of it."