Emilie Kozubíková

"I was about twenty years old when we went on a field trip to an institution for the blind. I almost collapsed there. Those girls could knit, crochet, read, and had radios to listen to. They had rooms where they even had bedspreads on their beds. They had dolls with strollers. When I experienced the luxury of that community and the intellectual growth of those people, I thought I was going to have a stroke. I had been against it so much, and even my mother didn't want to put me there because it was an institution. Then you find that you missed out on the opportunity for education, the community of people who could have guided you the right way. So I was brought into the marriage as an absolute dunce in everything. When I picked up a broom, my mother, who would never let me do anything, was collapsing in laughter seeing the way I held the broom."

"It happened to me when I was a mum. My husband and I both didn't see, and there was this one bus driver who always wanted me off the bus when he saw me. I had a ZTP/P (disability) card which meant I could have a guide. But he understood it to mean that I had to have a guide. He would always throw me off the bus for not having a guide. I couldn't wake the kids up in the morning to take me to the bus to work. Why should I? I knew my route. And hiring a guide to get me to work wasn't an option. I could never tell which bus the driver was on to avoid him. So I was always embarrassed because when I got on the bus, all the people could hear him haggling with me and throwing me off the bus, like maybe I didn't want to pay."

"As a child, I lived away from war, I didn't really know much about it. I spent most of my time with my grandmother in Návsí, my mother's mother who had sixteen grandchildren. I had a great time there, and when I came home I had two nannies. They both had to take care of me and they helped my mother in the shop and cooked, so they didn't have much time for me. Then my mother's sister moved into the bakery during the war. She had married a Pole, settled in Český Těšín and they had a son. But her husband also had to enlist in the Wehrmacht. So Mum's sister moved in to help Mum. And she took her son, who was born in 1940, just like me. We grew up as twins. And we used to go loitering in the bakery. We didn't see much of the war, except that the adults were terribly frightened and tense - and they passed that on to us. Because the war was terrible. Daddy had to enlist. Mummy, fortunately, did everything in the bakery with Daddy, so then she was able to be a foreman and apprentice young people. But as soon as she had trained somebody, they were taken off to war again."