Luboš Holoubek

“The reason it happened was that the relatives told my mom that a tailor’s profession was nothing special. There are three army barracks in the town, and they told her she should have dated an officer instead. That she would have had a better life with some officer. My mom considered this better, and she therefore left my dad. She placed my brother in an orphanage and I stayed at home and I was being brought up by a new mom: I am thankful to her, although it was quite tough for me, because I had stepbrothers and, as it usually happens, this did have an impact on me. Mom was strict, too, but as a little boy I had to admit that she took care of me in every way. When I was later moving out of Jičín, I looked for her. She didn’t expect that I, a stepchild, would come to see her. But I went to her to thank her that she had taken care of me and for everything that she had done for me. She was happy, because she didn’t expect it.”

“When we went there for the first time, people were confused. They asked us whether they ought to go to work to the Žďas factory or not. I was immediately summoned to the Žďas headquarters and they told me that people should come to work. Moms were calling us and asking whether nurseries and kindergartens would be functioning. People were calling and asking about the situation in the hospital. We called the director of the hospital and he told us that they were preparing a meeting and that they would be on duty and dealing with the situation twenty-four hours a day, including the nights. The same with deliveries. We called the bakery, because there was nothing left in shops, as it usually happens in situations like this. We thus called the bakery manager and he said that he knew about it, and that they would continue baking bread all the time, even at night, so that deliveries of bread cold be ensured, and he asked me to relay this information to people so that they would stop hoarding bread.”