"He was loading the uranium ore into the mine cars and moving it to the cage to lift it up. So he worked directly with the pitchblende. He suffered from the Bechterew's disease, but this he discovered already in the concentration camp. Fortunately, his leukemia only appeared after 30 years. When he came back from the uranium mines, everybody said that he was pale, but in fact he already had leukemia."
"I went three days to Barrandov to draw cartoons. And there was Vašek Bedřich who knew me from Příbram, where he was in the Catholic Boy Scout. I passed the tests, although he didn't have to help me. By chance I knew how to draw it, the step, or how people are turning, that's what they told me to draw. So I could start at work from November. And we were lucky, because my husband was arrested already in February 1954."
"He read that pamphlet to our acquaintances at a party and everybody laughed. And he also read it at work. And someone was passing by who didn't even know my husband. He only knew that he was a JUDr., because he said 'doctor', and that guy reported it to the police."
"My husband always said: 'Take as much as you can from my package'. And then he saved him. He was so lucky! When my husband got his first bout of Bechterew, after a month in the hospital he would normally have been sent to the gas, but he took care of him there and my husband was filling out the obituaries that were sent home."
"At that time, people said that it was done by a communist who didn't like him because of the low wages. In 1928, there was a crisis in the mining industry. So he moved the ladder to the floor below. My father fell from a height of about 15 meters. He was unconscious. But he didn't break anything, it just damaged all the nerves on his left hand."
Květuše Frankenbergerová originates in Chrustenice, where her father, Ladislav Hoftich, worked as a mining engineer in a local iron-ore mine. Later, he became the director of the Prague Iron Works. Mrs. Frankenbergerová was born on 23 April, 1920. After high school, she attended the Rotter School of marketing and fashion in Prague. At the beginning of the war, she managed to get a glimpse of the Baťa works in Zlín, where she worked as an advertisement graphic designer. Thereafter, it all boiled down to evading the threat of being assigned to forced labor. After the war, she returned to graphic work. In 1946, she married a lawyer and military historian, Otakar Frankenberger, who had spent some time in Nazi concentration camps during the war. They had two children together and in 1953, Květa Frankenbergerová returned to work, this time as a cartoonist in the film Studio “Bratři v triku” (Brothers in T-shirt). Here she also worked in the years of her husband’s imprisonment (for a satirical anti-communist story he had to work in the uranium mines) and throughout the 1960s. Since 1975, she’s been retired.
