Anna Šubová

“I went to do feather-plucking to Velíšek, which was a nearby village where we the girls were going to help, and I had to sit separately and I was not even allowed to sit among the other girls. Their moms did not allow it. It was because of my haircut. My mom was crying and she would not even talk to me. When she entered the kitchen through one door, I left through the other door. Whenever she looked at me, she started crying. I didn’t know what to do, it was not possible to extend the hair. I had a perm done immediately; I didn’t even know what it was. The hairdresser asked me what kind of perm I wanted, whether lukewarm or cold. I have never had it done before, and so I said that I wanted the lukewarm one. There was an electrical machine for that, which she plugged in, and she twisted a lock of my hair around the hair-curler, and secured it with a hair grip and when it began breaking, I was sweating all over, but it was finally done. I was sitting in the town square in Kaplice until half past seven in the evening and I was afraid to go home. At that time I was working in the kindergarten for agricultural workers’ kids, and there were children in prams as well as older children, because their moms went to work in the fields and they brought them over to us. I was working there with certain Mrs. Uvačíková, she was taking care of the kids and I was cooking. Her house was on my way and so I stopped by and asked her if she would be so kind to go home with me. I knocked at the door: ´Mrs. Uvačíková, please come with me.´ I was afraid to go home. Well, nothing happened, but my parents were crying at what I had done. I felt sick, because I didn’t know what to do, it was not possible to extend the hair anymore, because I had been given my cut off pigtails and I carried them home in my hand. But all the other girls had their hair cut within a year, all of them. I was the one who went to theatre or to cinema. We were thus all assimilating in this way.”

“In 1946 those gentlemen, Czechs and Slovaks, arrived there and began campaigning among the people. They always invited them to someone’s house, but they were mostly inviting the young people, like Tonda or Štefan. They promised them that there would be work there, that there were farms where they would be able to work. And when they told my dad that he would have horses there, he jumped at the chance, because horses were more than oxen. But mom didn’t want to move at first, but aunt Růža, her sister, was the first who went here, sometime in autumn 1946. The boys ran away, and our parents had to catch them at the railway station. Mom then said: ´Fine, if you are not afraid to be hungry, I have already been in Brazil and I have been all over the world, and so I will go there, too.”