Arnošt Obst

“That was also the reason why dad told me back then in 1968 that if I wanted to, I could come to Germany and that he would help me. We already had little Renatka, and my wife was expecting, our daughter Lenka was to be born, and she said that she would not leave the country, because her mom was here and that we would stay here. Well, otherwise we would have probably left. I don’t regret that we didn’t go to Germany, even though there were times when it was not easy for us.”

“There used to be a racing circuit in Olivětín and we used to play soccer there, and we were going to the field to gather poppy seeds, and playing games; there were two old grannies living in a small house there, and we were going to frighten them. Dad then gave me a thrashing for that. It is all right, I would do the same today. We were all friends in Olivětín. In the evenings, we were going out, sitting on the benches and singing. And even boys five years older than us would sit down with us, sing and play games. We were going to the pond when it was frozen over during the time when they were cutting ice, and we would take our sledges and attach them behind the sledge that transported the ice. They were cutting blocks of ice from the pond in front of the beer brewery. They were cutting the ice and placing it onto the sledge and then pulling it up the hill and they had a kind of openings there and they were cutting the ice into smaller pieces on a special platform and throwing it into those openings and sending it down into the cellars. They were using it for cooling until the following winter.”