"I loved going to pict hops. At the end of August, we always went as the whole school, except for perhaps graduation classes, we went to pick hops in the Rakovnicko region. We were picking it there and first the line had to be toren down. I hope I'm saying that correctly. We had to comb the berries in a basket, and when it was full, we went to measure. That meant that there was a lady who had a metal pot, it was a kind of a measure. We poured it in there, and when it was pretty full, she gave us one token. We actually received money for the tokens we had saved at the end of the hop brigade. Everyone tried to make as many of the buckets as possible in a day, because each of them meant a token. In the end, it was counted and someone, for example, earned 600 crowns, another one 200. Depending on how hard one tried. The most beautiful thing for us was the fun during hops picking, because even though we sat and combed the lines, we were next to each other, each had one line. We could talk, sing and have fun. I like to remember that. In the evening we could stroll around the village, but only until a certain time, for example at ten we had to be in our quarters. Don't imagine the dormitory as a hotel, it was rather simple, there were stacked beds made of metal. The boys usually slept in the hayloft. They only had mattresses on the hay in the hayloft and slept there. The professor was watching over them, we were being watched by women so we wouldn't do anything silly."
"I remember as a girl, but I had to be in that national school, so it was the third grade. They went to court here, and up on the court steps stood Maresiev. We were down on the sidewalk, not only us from the Beroun school, but also the people just passing by. I don't know on what occasion he was here, but I can see him completely before his eyes, standing there, black coat, dark hair, if they were black, brown, I don't know, but dark. Then we saw the movie and I was really moved. When he has no legs and he walked, it was probably not that visible on him. He must have been clumsy, I don't know. In the movie we saw, then he himself said the moment when the other war pilots asked him that it was cold in those cabins, and he didn't particularly put on much clothes, how he did it. And so he pulled out his pants and they saw that he had wooden legs. It was a tremendous effort for him to return to that war and to fight again."
"We had to practice Spartakiads. School management, in the second grade it was done by PE teachers without any doubt, and in the first grade they always appointed someone who was in charge of younger students. I was always in charge of the boys because they thought I was sharper, so I also supervised the boys in the second grade. I had to be tougher somehow. Although I was tougher, I never managed to practice the Spartakiad at all. The kids didn't want to, so it occurred to me that the boys were boycotting it. They practiced with red flying saucers, today you throw it to dogs or to each other. I had sixteen boys to train with. Unfortunately, we went to rehearsals, it turned out that we didn't even count to sixteen, we were two people short. They didn't do it properly, so bad. The problem was that I was summoned to ONV, and there I was reprimanded for not practicing Spartakiad. I understand it from their position, but on the other hand I was sorry, I was so overwhelmed, they didn't want to go. I also flew to their houses to go to the children, but they just didn't go."
Alexandra Krejčová was born on July 15, 1947 in Prague. However, her whole life is closely connected with Beroun. She graduated from the Faculty of Education and after graduating she joined one of Beroun‘s primary schools. She first taught in the first grade and later in the second grade. She taught Czech language and history. Towards the end of her career, she worked with children with learning disabilities as a class assistant. In 2021 she lived in Beroun.
