Jiřina Hurtová

"It was 1968, and there was nothing in the shops, even when I was pregnant, I had some nappies left over from the time Ivanka was a baby and some jackets. And there were no ultrasounds at that time, so I went to the maternity hospital and Ládík was born first. And the nurse came to me immediately that she would treat me, she caught me and yelled: ‘Doctor, come back, there is another one!’ So, the doctor came, my second son was born, and I just kept saying: ‘Good Lord, what will I do? What will I do?’ Because I and my husband got married, I moved into an old building, It was 60 years old, but nothing had been fixed. There was no central heating, toilet, or water; the water was only in a laundry room opened with a lever and we wanted to reconstruct the house and needed money. And suddenly, you have two children and buy everything two times! Suddenly, there were such expenses. In the maternity hospital, I was shocked for three days, and I was just saying: ’What will I do, what will I do?’ Eventually, I got a certificate from the maternity hospital that I had twins and with that certificate I went to the department store to get them to sell me extra nappies because the allotment for the baby was, I do not know, twenty nappies, so I needed more nappies. So, I got baby jackets and everything with the certificate because there were no goods.”

“He [dad] was genuinely nice and educated for his time. I know that he subscribed to a magazine called Náš chov (Our Breeding) and there he read everything he needed to know about cattle, and he created - it was called a studbook, I mean the cows were noted in a studbook and he bred young bulls and sold them in auctions in Veselí nad Moravou. We brought them there, sometimes also heifers when we had more heifers but mainly bulls. And one cost for example five thousand or four thousand seven hundred and it was really a lot of money at that time. So, because he was such a skilful farmer regarding fruit, cattle and fields and he was considered a really good farmer, well, not just considered, he was a good farmer. And I believe that people from the village respected him the way he deserved.”