"I'm going to praise myself now. Because I was a handy girl and I had to go and work as a worker. I made flax in the mills, we rubbed the flax, it was a terrible job, rather dusty there. But I was handy and when the director, when he needed something, when the wagons with flax arrived, he took me to the office and I wrote and counted how many meters it had and how much they would get for it. And that's how I somehow got into the typing competition and I won. And since I won, I was then sent to Prague to Minister Málek. He was the Minister of Light Industry. I was a typist in his office. And when I came home afterwards, I said to my father: "Well, a gulag daughter, she wasn't allowed to go to study, but I was allowed to run around the minister's office." So I was so proud."
"I am one of seven children and I had four brothers. Three were older than me, so we knew everything, Vlachovice all from above the tree height. Once I got whipped from my father like that across the legs. We had a beautiful forest and every year it was decreed, we called it a forest. Every year it was decreed that a certain quota of spruce must be planted there. So that the forests that are cut down, to be replanted with fresh one. And we are, I was with the boys, just me with the boys, we were climbing a spruce tree in our grove, now we swung, we let go, and as we went down to the ground, we broke the top off. And daddy tied wood from the forest and heard that something was happening there, so he stopped the horse and holding the whip he ran to where something was happening. So he spanked me over my legs, because he loved the forest. And that wasn't allowed! That wasn't allowed!"
“We used to dance every Saturday afternoon all summer long. A floor was built in our forest, Humlíček's band used to go there. They came to Vlachovice in front of our house, it was a kilometre to our forest along the road. They started playing there, they led us into the forest, there was already built a dance floor. We danced there and at six o'clock in the morning I went to work and my father took the band away.”
Josefa Kochmannová was born on June 21, 1932 in Fryšava under Žáková hora in Vysočín. As a child she experienced World War II, she remembers the marches of the Hitler Youth or the shootout between partisans and German soldiers at the end of the war. In 1946, she and her family moved to a farm. After February 1948, her family was labeled gulag. Josefa Kochmannová could therefore not study, she worked in the flax mills. But by chance she got into a typing competition, which she won and got a job in the ministry. In 1950, she moved to Prague. At one of the summer jobs, she met her future husband, with whom she spent the next seventy years of her life. Josefa Kochmannová died in 2022.
