Anna Marxová

„On August 15, I started in Zlín, and I was only fifteen on the nineteenth. You know, the beginnings were hard, but there it was so elaborate, it was so researched ... First I went to school, where I learned all possible jobs. At first I did leather preparation and then I also worked in a workshop where children's shoes were made. I worked all sorts of jobs and eventually worked my way up to a skilled sewing of uppers. We did 1,200 pairs a day in one workshop and I sewed 400 of them myself. And after work we had fun, we went to school, it was called Baťa's School of Work. We went to get lunch and for that time and the misery of the war, I must say that they tried to feed us whatever they could get their hands on. We had a lot of fish and I learned to eat tomatoes there, which I did not eat before. They simply made an effort to provide us with everything possible. I even took dancing classes there, we all went to lunch together, we played sports. My parents didn't have to worry about me at all. The only thing was that I worked like crazy. We also had to do bookkeeping for the things we spent money on. Or if we wanted to go to the cinema or the theater, we had to submit a ticket and we had a book where we had to write, for example: 'I ask your kind permission to go to the cinema or theater.' Depending on where.“