Jiřina Kozáková

"We didn't have to sign [the consent to the entry of Warsaw Pact troops], but we had to start introducing political things into any subject. I was teaching civics at the time, in addition to chemistry, and there it was simple, it was political, so let's put it that way. It was worse when I taught math. How do you fit that in? In chemistry, how do you fit it in? That was so complicated, but we had to do it, so we did it. The bulletin boards were obviously for that, we were happy to have those friends there, we had political training every week... we had to make reports out of that, it was always rotating, a topic was drawn, A team from the factory would come to train and test us, and they rotated, which was unpleasan, really very unpleasant..."

"Mostly they were Romanian Slovaks, but they came from the villages next door, like Suš, Svéráz, Zátoň, they came from there, so they had problems with the teaching, maybe they didn't understand properly. But there was nobody like that in Větřní, not even in Němčí, all the tribal people who lived there before the war, they stayed there, even though they had a connection with the Austrians, yeah, so they all stayed there, it was a kind of a closed community, I would say good people, although of course sometimes the farmer would look at us picking apples, or my friend and I, who came from that farm, we had a stove there, there were these ovens, you put what was left over from lunch to keep it warm, so many times my friend and I would go and eat a bit of it... so I know her mum wasn't too happy afterwards, but she never scolded us or forbade us to go to them... so as I say, there was a kind of a gated community there, it was a little bit more complicated in that Větřní, which was the original part, the classic Větřní, so those were the houses where the Germans really were and they had to move out. What I know from my friends, even though they would be ninety years old today, but they were friends of mine, they told me, they were still meeting, until the lady died, they were still meeting with the Germans. They lived with them partly and they were nice to each other. But there was a house next door, a farm, and it was the other way round, the Germans were doing... Well, they were saying goodbye to their property... I can't imagine that the house that my husband and I built, that I would be thrown out, I would be unpleasant too..."