Jaroslava Picková

“By coincidence, our neighbor was head of the machinery station. I used to visit him there because I needed to sort all those things out. I told him: ‘Please, Mr. Halbych, we need to harvest the rye!’ He responded: ‘Well, yeah, but I can’t… You know what? There will be two boys working on the collective field next to yours. If you arrange with them to harvest your field when they are done with that one, it’s fine by me.’ So I went to them and this future husband of mine stopped the machine. He asked the other guy: ‘So what do you say, will we do it?’ He replied that he had already promised this to someone else. In the end, he said: ‘Okay, when we’re done here, I will just move over to the next field. But who will sit in the binder?’ I replied: ‘Well, I suppose me.’ – ‘Okay, then.’ So he moved over and my poor mum then came on her bike and asked: ‘Oh my god, how will you put all of this together?’ She meant the binding machine. And this future husband of mine told her: ‘We will put it together with your daughter.’”

“There was a period when my father arranged boxes with pure uranium ore. There was so much money in it – we could have built golden roads. The boxes were 30 x 30 x 40 cm large. Since uranium has large density, one of those boxes weighed 130 kilograms. He used to sort those into stacks. Every day a fully loaded Tatra 111 truck with a trailer headed towards Russia. Once my father bent down to pick up a box. Suddenly he overheard the voice of my grandma, his mother: ‘Frantiku, Frantiku!’ He thought he was just dreaming. So he bent over again but once again heard this terrible scream. So he stood up and as he did the whole pile behind him fell down. Had he stayed bent down, it would have broken his neck. We then made sense of the story – it was in early November 1954. At that time, one night I and my mum heard a terrible scream of my grandma: ‘Frantiku, Frantiku!’ She was beside herself, banging the door and the window. We ran out and she was saying: ‘Where is Frantik, you don’t want to show him to me!’ She was completely deranged, her eyes wide open, running around the house. We couldn’t understand, why.”