Marie Kučerová

"The Škoda plant produced an awful lot of smoke, there was a fall of fly ash because the power plant was there. I know that when I was outside drying nappies, then I used to fold them on the table at home. Then when I touched the table like that, my whole hand was covered in ash, dust, it was terrible. They always took it out in some wagons, and when it rained they didn't do it because it got lost somehow. I know my husband and I went out on a date and I was wearing a coat with a hood. When I got home and took the hood off, I had black stripes on my face as the ash was falling and as it was snowing and the snow smeared it on my mouth."

"It was a room and a kitchen, it was about 20 [square] metres, there was nothing really, just those two rooms, and the cold water and the toilet were in the corridor. My parents had a tiled stove in one of those rooms, it was called a radinye. Then I know that my grandfather demolished it and they got a normal stove. But we didn't have gas in that street, so Mum used to make tea in the morning on a spirit stove like they used for camping. Otherwise, she had to make fire in the stove and we cooked on the stove. We had a washbasin behind the stove where we used to wash up. There was a bathhouse down in Karlov somewhere, but it had been bombed out in the war and it wasn't rebuilt, it didn't work anymore. I know that my mother used to go to the town baths once in a while to bathe, otherwise it happened in the wooden tub or in a tin bathtub. It was more likely to be that wooden bathtub, that everybody took a bath and then the laundry was put there to soak."