Josef Ptáček

"We were still living in the old apartment, in the so-called castle in Studená. I liked those Ježíšek very much, because I believed that Ježíšek brings presents and that if I was good, he would bring me something nice. And I really wanted an electric train. And come this Christmas, I might have been about six or seven years old, maybe five or six, I would guess. And all of a sudden the bell just rang and that meant we could go from the Christmas Eve table to the room where the tree was lit and the electric train was running under the tree. I burst into tears of happiness and I couldn't quite believe that this could happen, that my greatest wish had come true and I was so upset about it that I refused to take the acylcoffin, it wasn't acylpyrine then, it was acylcoffin. And I didn't like it, it was a bit bitter in my mouth a bit and I didn't want to let my parents spoil my impression of the train, I thought I'm going to sit by that train and play with it and learn to back up and change switches. And then the command was to go to bed, it was the time. And they said that if I didn’t take the pill, it wasn’t out of the question that Ježíšek would see it and take the train away from me again. I just didn’t believe it. I didn’t take the pill, and in the morning, the train was gone."

"They even those two sisters, because my dad came from eight children. One of them died in the First World War as a legionnaire, and by the way he wrote wonderful diaries, which actually got lost after the death of one of those Viennese aunts, but I rather think someone stole it, because it was a much nicer read than Erich Maria Remarque's On the Western Front at Rest. But it can't be helped, some things just were and aren't, but that's the way of the world. So that Aunt Bozena, the Viennese one, she was very important to me. And I never knew this Jarek, the author of those literary works, because when the First World War happened, I wasn't born yet. But according to the photographs, he was a very likeable person."