Josef Lacek

"My brother, the stepbrother, says to me, 'If you eat that soup, the school will burn down by morning.' We had no meat or anything like that in the evening, just soup from lunch. That's how we ate. And my brother says to me, 'If you eat that plate of soup, the school will burn down.' But in the morning I got up, I ran to see, and the school was standing. 'You haven't eaten enough,' my brother says. That was one of the things that started to colour my life. And the other incident happened when I was a left-handed boy in the municipal school. They used to watch me do everything with my left hand. And that's what moved me up. And I got to fifth or sixth place in my class in that municipal school."

"My earliest memories from my childhood are of going to school, being called "krchňa" and having my hand tied to the desk with a rope. Only when I needed to go to the toilet, to od a number one or two, they would untie me. I would run away from school immediately." - "Why did they tie you up and why did they call you krchňa?" - "Because I did everything with my left hand. And that was literally a swear word when they called me krchňa. How I didn't like going to school! 'Why was I ever born if I have to go to that school,' I used to say."