Kamil Tyrychtr

"In the 1990s we had elections to parliament. The regime was practically removed from the whole society, but there were still town national committees and similar structures. And we had a lease on the garden from 1972 for twenty years, so until 1992, and even at this time my grandfather started getting letters from the local committee telling him to move out, that he would never be allowed to renew the lease. Well, and then with one of these letters we found him, or rather my aunt found him dead sitting in a chair, so he couldn't stand it and had a heart attack. In the ninety-first, thank God, there were elections for the local councils, the local national committee board was replaced and, strangely enough, three months later we were able to buy the garden."

"My grandfather had a small factory, which of course was taken away from him after the year forty-eight, and when he began to build a garden on rented land in Pařezská Lhota, it quickly began to happen that his former employees began to appear there. And it was quite interesting to listen to them recalling how happily they had survived the war, that the employees had, could buy at factory prices some, not unlimited, of course, but limited quantities of flour, sugar to take home, and how different it was afterwards when February came, or rather when they took over Grandpa's factory in the forty-ninth. The national administration came in and suddenly all the employees rather went, how to put it politely, just the situation turned dramatically, all the employee benefits that were there under that evil capitalist suddenly disappeared and suddenly everybody was worse off because of the successful national administration. Well, since I was never one of the nicest and quietest pupils, every now and then I would say something like that at school, and our comrade headmaster didn't like it at all."