Anežka Lišková

“My mother-in-law told me it was awful for them, when they came in 1949. She said: ‘Just imagine, they stood us by the wall, aimed their guns at us.’ My youngest brother-in-law was fourteen at the time, the older one was eighteen, and he told me: ‘They threw everything out, they kept searching to see if we had any gold.’ To which my mother-in-law retorted: ‘Oh please, where would we have gold, seeing that my husband spent everything on the machines? We didn’t have a crown to spare in our house, everything went into the machines.’ She said that when the State Security men left, it was terrible: what they could break, they broke, what they could take, they took. She said: ‘We didn’t have anything.’”

“We started work at the hospital in Uherské Hradiště on 1 July. It was a beautiful day, there were a hundred-and-nineteen of us young girls, nineteen and twenty years old. We had old graduated, we had our diplomas, but we didn’t know how to do anything. Afterwards, when we served with the nuns, we realised what t meant to have proper work experience. Oh, you know, we were young girls, we didn’t even take it as an injustice that the nuns were leaving, we just took up our places. There was a nun serving with us in our ward for another five months.”