Marcela Jirásková

"Well, then I started going to school, but in the first grade it wasn't very good because I got a teacher, maybe I can say that today, because she's probably long since dead. The teacher's name was Vlasta Písecká, I remember to this day. And the teacher bullied me a lot - today it's called bullying, so she bullied and humiliated me. I had to stand at the step every morning, I wasn't allowed to sit at my desk. The teacher came, sniffed me to see if I smelled and when she found out that I didn't smell and that I was clean, I could sit in the pew. I sat in the back pew and no one was allowed to sit in front of me and not next to me either. Well, because it was because my father was a chimney sweeper and a teacher thought that our dad came home from work dirty, but he really washed every time, so I could have been dirty too. And because it was in the fifties or earlier in those years and it was still that rigid or there was communism. So there was such an institution and it was called pou personal committee of the communist party of the Czechoslovakia. And those were the kind of ladies who didn't go to work because their husbands were directors of something and were the true communists. And they, because at that time no comrade could not go to work, it was not socialist, it was not worthy of a socialist woman not to go to work. So they compensated for the job by being street committees and taking care of the cleanliness and proper development of the others. So the teacher Písecká sent the street committee to us. The ladies came, rang the bell, opened the cupboards, looked in our drawers, checked if the dad was taking a bath or where he was sleeping. And when they found out that he was sleeping normally in a bed covered with white sheets, they were terribly surprised, because they thought that just because he got dirty at work, he was always dirty. Well, dad arrived during their visit and got very upset. He banished the ladies. And it was bad, because it was already a political crime, he acted against political power. And the only thing that saved us that time was that he was a chimney sweep and his great passion was fishing. And he built almost all the ponds or repaired all the ponds in Slané and the surrounding area. And he worked as a housekeeper for fishermen. And his friend was a certain Miloslav Frolík, I called him Uncle Milda, but he wasn't an uncle either. And he was with the state police. I don't know why, I've never seen him sympathize with or praise that party in my life. He was just cursing like all the others, but he was just at the secret police and at that time somehow he stood up for our