Vendulka Jozífová

“At the end of the war when Germans were leaving Pardubice through the Třída míru street, Arnošt Smrž, the father of Jitka, and other officers and non-commissioned officers were marching from Zelená brána to Veselka and a German car hit them on purpose, so two of them were injured, Eliáš was killed instantly and Arnošt Smrž died 14 days later. So Jitka, my friend, actually did never meet her father.”

“I think that the physical maturity begins here with these little children because when I started to exercise with parents and their children, the docent Jana Berdychová always used to say that the intelligence of a child is formed before his fifth birthday. And if the child learns the need to do sports, he has it for life. Nowadays you walk down the street and you see it, I think the girls are unhappy, they gained too many kilos, they do not exercise, I do not know how this will lead our nation forward. I lead exercises of pre-schoolers in Sokol and I see in them how terribly happy they are because they can finally exercise again. And usually, they are the children of some athletes or parents who know that it is very important that the children gain this foundation in the age between three and six years.”

“My dad was an engineer architect in railways if you can imagine it – building bridges, reconstructions of tracks and sometimes it was even critical because once he did a reconstruction of the track from Ústí nad Orlicí to Choceň where are huge problems and at that time it slipped and he was even jailed. And only thanks to one lawyer who was reasonable and he postponed it over and over, it got postponed because otherwise it would be like a sabotage. He also did reconstructions of tracks for instance in north Bohemia where brown coal was mined later by surface method and my mom always said that the greatest experiences happened when my dad went to the bridges he liked – for example by the architect Bechyně and we have documents about for instance how the local Prokopův most was built. And as we know today, the bridges do fall, it is interesting that Bechyně’s bridges do not fall, they are built very well. And people should do high-quality work and my dad was doing it.”

“Well, the schooling is always about people, about teachers and about children. And about teacher who are not scared and for example tell the truth and about parents who raise their children. We were raised in a family where no one hide anything from us and where they familiarized us with things which other children did not have at all and we did it in a similar way and I think we put our children, two daughters, into a role that they knew what even the political situation means. They alone had to decide whether they can say something or nor. I know that later when my children were to go to the secondary school, one of my neighbours told me: ‘You have to work in the street committee otherwise your daughter won’t be admitted.’ And I told her: ‘Don’t be mad at me, Maruška, but I’m not going to join the street committee because I think I do quite a lot.’”

“Let’s do the wedding sooner. So, I went to the national committee at Pernštýnské náměstí with Mr. Jakubovič who was a wedding registrar and I arranged it – on Thursday at 3’o clock in the afternoon and we got married. There was my husband, I, we had two witnesses, cousin, mom and aunt. That was all. We got married. It was a vale of tears. Then we went out and there was a small table in front of the city hall that we protest against the invasion of comradely armies. Well, we signed it there. And we went home. And my mom said: ‘I guess you are hungry, right?’ She brought us peanuts and that was our only treat. Well, we liked peanuts. Well and on 24th there was the official wedding, but it was only the feast. Well and the feast was like a vale of tears because the only source was the radio operating on wires and the radio operating on wires was the only one broadcasting because other media were banned.”