“We had a house, a former distillery that my grandfather had bought. It had a huge garden with about seventy trees, a courtyard and, in between, a smaller courtyard with a little garden. When my mother married, she brought the family a dowry of one hundred thousand, which was a great fortune at the time. But then we had nothing of it left. Many things changed. The communists came to power and they took everything. They took the shop. All of mom's fortune was gone, and my father got stomach ulcers from such sorrow. When he was in the hospital in Kolín, they found out that he had signs of cancer, then he had a stroke and died a few days later."
"My mother, who was already over seventy at the time, was told that she could not receive a pension. She was told that she had three children, who could take care of her. She truly didn’t get anything at all. When my father died in the hospital in Kolín, she was penniless. That's when I got up and went to the town hall. I told them to be ashamed of themselves that my mother had lived there for over fifty years, and that she had not lied around, she had worked - and they were not able to give her a single Crown. I told them that we don't need them to tell us to take care of her. Mom had arrived at the town hall using two crutches. She couldn’t walk very well and said: 'How would you feel? If I had no children, I would stand here naked and hungry.' I told them that I live in Ostrava. When I said that, I was told that if I move my mother to Ostrava, she would receive the lowest possible pension, that they would give it to her there. I didn't have the heart to rip my mother away from where she had lived all her life. Me and my two brothers would rather take care of her."
"When I was coming back from school, a small plane suddenly appeared. Usually a black man sat in it. He would fly in front of the train whenever it was outside the station. He tilted the plane’s wings, which was a signal for the train driver to stop. The sensible driver stopped. We got off the train, lay down on one side behind the embankment, he flew in from the other side and shot the locomotive to pieces, so that the train could not reach the front. Once, a plane chased him all the way from Prague. He rushed to the station, just outside Poděbrady, where the Cidlina flows into the Elbe. He was already running out of gas before he reached Libice, and he was getting annoyed, so he hit a locomotive and three coaches got the worst of it."
Hermína Petrželová was born on February 15, 1927 in Poděbrady. Her parents Marie and Josef Vaníček owned a wholesale store selling spirits and wine. The family was doing very well, they could even afford to have a maid. During the Second World War, the witness was allocated to work in a factory producing sealing material for submarines and aircrafts. In 1948, she met a man who was on vacation in Poděbrady and was planning to open his own private design office in Ostrava. They got married, she moved in with him, but the communist authorities made it impossible for them to do business. Their property was nationalized. Her father Josef Vaníček had a stroke and died. The witness found a job at the Public Health Office in Ostrava and worked there until her retirement. She never joined the Communist Party and did not keep her dislike for the party, caused by the events of 1948, a secret.
