Josef Hora

"In the year 1945 after the war, when Sokol was restored in Kladno, I started going there as a teenager. It was supposed to be of great interest and it would be necessary to expand the Sokol training centre, so they already had a plan. There was a builder, whose name was Emil Marcín, and he had a plan in place to complete the centre. He intended the hall would be expanded by an area as large as the training hall, so in 1947 the centre was built and I worked part-time there. It regarded the older members, in their working years, thirty, thirty-five, fifty, drove to one of Kladno's mines, where certain galleries had once been walled up in order to prevent possible floods once. There was no danger anymore, so they used to come there to get the bricks out. Another, who was also a member of Sokol and had road transport, he drove it to the construction site, one truck after another. A voluntary working obligation was announced; anyone who passed by and had two hours or half a day free, could sit down, there were small chairs, axes available, and cleaned the bricks. And they left them in the pile again. We were teenagers at the time, and the builder explained to us: 'Here it will be built in this line, so make a stack of bricks from this line about two or three meters.'"

"In the year 1962, they liquidated the whole of Újezd, as I said, there are maybe three hundred people, the shops and so on. They issued a special decree, and the district confirmed that it would be bought. So it was bought and were there houses, perhaps built a long time ago, made of stone, had two rooms and a courtyard, so they got – people agreed amongst each other - for example they got forty or fifty thousand. Our house was estimated by Mr. Kaše to be worth a certain amount, I believe it was two hundred and fifty thousand crowns. Then there was an acreage from the district national committee that because the monetary reform was in the year 1953, so that my mother would get forty-three thousand five hundred for the house. Our of that she had thirty thousand in a tied deposit; in a year she could withdraw an amount, I don't know, maybe three or five thousand. She just couldn't pick it all up, or get a big sum at once. For the thirteen thousand that was left, she had to get her own apartment."

"In the beginning, Dr. Telner, a Polish lawyer, came to our kitchen, put a purchase agreement on the table, and said to the mother: 'Sign it.' Mom said: 'I will not do that.' Then he took out his gun and said: ´It is within my powers to shoot you all here.´ And he fired the pistol into the flowerpot. Mom didn't sign, so he packed it up and left. It was at the end of the year 1942. On the 23 March 1943 a group of people from Poldi factory came to our house and moved us out, quite literally on the street. They came to the stove wearing gloves, turned on the water, put out the fire, took the hot stove and carried it out on the street. A closet, a made bed, everything out on the street."