Růžena Teschinská

“I was so envious. They came from God-knows-where and simply took a house. It was all villas up the road from the school. They came over here and seized houses. Their daughter went to school with me and I visited her a few times. They had images of Stalin and Lenin in colour at home, and I was sorry we had none. I didn’t really understand it at the time. They were poor folk; they came from the hills near Železný Brod. They and the likes of them got all those beautiful houses. They were all commies.”

“The story of grandpa and his pouch. Grandpa used to fight by Moscow in the war. Then they lived upstairs from us. [Mother-in-law] did some cleaning and brought cotton threads in a bag. She pulled something out; it made of grey wool. It was like a pouch, with a line to tie it. At first, she burst into laughter, and then she let me guess what it was. I said: ‘Well, I have no idea.’ She feared grandpa’s balls could freeze in Russia, so she knit this pouch to keep them warm. My mum-in-law laughed so hard – it was like Christmas to her then. But, you know, times were tough back then.”

“My father-in-law was all the way in Russia. The French captured him later on, but I don’t know exactly where he was kept; in France, I guess, since it was the French who captured him. Years later, when I was living here married, they generously sent him money because he had worked there after the war. I don’t know how he made it from the eastern front; I know he was injured and was sent to the Baltic to recover. I know my mother-in-law remembered that; she went somewhere up there in Germany to stay with him.”