Václav Petr

“When I came there it was a modern power plant. But it was bad news for the nearby inhabitants whenever we received a supply of coal and lit the boilers. You couldn’t see anything. There’s a hill there, Farkáň, it’s visible from the road. The houses on it weren’t completely hidden from view by the smoke. On our way to work the women would shout at us from the windows that they couldn’t even air their rooms. We had to change our coal supplier, it really was a disgrace when the smoke blew right in the direction from the rails to Farkáň. The people there really had it hard back then.”

“I have an abiding memory of it because we’d just finished a tennis tournament at the courts, and we always celebrated that with a drink. So we were drinking, and suddenly there was news that the Russians are here. It’s a horrifying memory. No one knew anything. I don’t know, perhaps I was stupid, but I went to work the next day. They’d literally occupied us, and there’s me going to work as usual. Because no one knew what was going on, there was no information. I remember it as one of the worst days of my life. It wasn’t anything that anyone could agree with.”