Ing. Jiří Holenda

"I overtook such a very pretty girl. Long blond hair, blue eyes, excellent figure, she was always laughing. Just the perfect girl. Only I was unsuccess. But along with this girl was always her friend who wasn't blonde, didn't have blue eyes... well, but the interesting thing was that we were interested in the same things, unlike the blonde girl, and we laughed at the same things when we were angry or cursing something, it was usually the same things, and somehow, we gradually got together. It wasn't love at first sight, it was more like gradually getting to know each other and discovering that we actually understand each other quite well. So, we got to know each other further and further, and we recently celebrated fifty years of life together."

"Other than that, I have to say one more interesting thing, that by some coincidence the parents survived. Thanks, I would say, to German thoroughness. They lived in Bratislava before the war, and my father, as a successful lawyer, moved around in an intellectual environment, and the Germans went hard after him. But as Czech citizens, after the establishment of the Slovak state, they were immediately resettled. Grandma said they got 24 hours and a wagon. 24 hours to move out. So, when the Gestapo came to their original residence, they had no one to arrest, as the parents were already gone. And with German thoroughness: we haven't found anyone, so it is done, the end. They were crossed out. The train allegedly stopped in Pardubice, where my parents had never been before in their lives. And they stayed there anyway. And there again, even though Pardubice was riddled with spies, of course they had no record of dad there, because he didn't live there. Thanks to this coincidence, when they were evicted from Bratislava just right and there was nothing in Pardubice, thanks to that, I would say, they survived, because otherwise they would probably also have ended up in a concentration camp."