“As a member of the middle management of the shopping mall Marks and Spencer I used to bring papers to various departments. One day I was sent from our department to deliver an important letter to the top management. There were two lifts there; one for ordinary staff and the other one for the top managers. I took the one for employees as I had no right to take the director´s one. As I was standing there in the corner of a large lift, the doors opened all of a sudden and Simon Marks came in. Sir Simon Marks! Dear god, of course I got scared. He was known to ask many questions to young girls selling him clothes. So he asked me, if the clothes I was wearing are from our department and luckily they were, a kind of beige with knobs. So I replied: ‚Yes, sir Simon.‘ And he said in return: ‚It does you credit‘, as it suited me. Since then, as it spread out, I got famous. In the end they promoted me as the ‚junior fashion buyer‘.”
“Every fortnight I got a bag loaded with butter, eggs and everything else and at ten o´clock I brought it to a certain flat in the Old Town. The father of the family was Jew imprisoned in a concentration camp in Theresienstadt and his parents were too old.“
Full recordings
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v domě neteře Ivany Nezbedové v Košátkách , 06.06.2016
Jaroslava Kellet, née Škarbanová, was born in 1921 in Kročehlavy near Kladno. Her father, the Czech state railways conductor, was a rough and a despotic man. Following mother´s death, who died at birth, she left to her relatives to Prague. First she worked as a writer and soon a personal assistant of Jiří Fragner, the owner of a pharmacy U Černého orla and a pharmaceutical company in Prague-Hostivař. During the Nazi occupation she distributed food to the persecuted families. In 1947 she left to a stage in the Great Britain and after the communist coop she decided to stay for good. She worked as a writer in the London shopping mall Marks and Spencer and gradually worked her way up as a junior buyer and a manager of clothing department. Later she moved to the Littlewoods mall and moved to Southport near Liverpool, where she´s been living until today. Due to emigration she had to give up the Czechoslovak citizenship and could not meet her sister for twenty years, who stayed in the Czechoslovakia and was persecuted by the communists.
