"The first time I was in Aš, I was fourteen years old, and I came here to the pioneer house for a weekend, so to speak. And at that time I was in the middle of the city, and where there are apartment buildings on main street today, there were one- or two-floor houses that were unoccupied, and they were what it looks like when something is unoccupied for a long time. So, they are basically gray windows, some of them broken, and it just looks incredibly bleak. It looks terribly desolate. This was in 1963, so it was after the church fire up there. So Aš looked very ugly, it was very ugly. But when I graduated with my first husband and we were looking for a place to work, there were a lot of young doctors coming out then, and there were a lot of old doctors too, so it wasn't so easy to get a job. And we didn't want to go to the other side of the country, because we had one parent in Mariánské Lázně and my parents in Cheb and we thought that they would get older and they would need us, so we couldn't do that. But in Cheb they offered us a place in pathology, we didn't want that. But in Aš it was in the internal medicine and in the pediatric ward. So we went to Aš."
"So the Raven Settlement. The first task was for moms and dads, because we reminded them that they needed to have their children either in proccessed skins, in earned ones, or just have something that would indicate that this is an ancient Czech basin. Then, of course, a story had to be made up. Yes, all the proccessed skins, and we proccessed skins for our children who went with us. They were very fond of us for that, for the first time in my life I proccessed rabbit skins. Then, of course, a story had to be made up, and there was actually a thread running through the story that we were looking for the last raven. We have some idea where his grave is, and we're supposed to uncover it. And in order for the kids to find the raven, they had to earn it. So there was archery, there was spear throwing, there was grinding grain between two rocks and making pancakes out of it, there was having to keep a fire going night and day, there was going out on night watches, of course. In the meantime, there was this long two-day trip with an overnight stay in the wilderness, and we were actually kind of merchants who brought some knowledge to the settlement where the ravens lived. And they always brought some knowledge, so they taught the ravens."
"We lived in an old house, so called after the Germans, it was a kind of prefabricated building, you could say, at that time. And right next to us there were several bombed-out houses with these open cellars, and that's where we used to go to play as very small children. And then I, I remember very well going to kindergarten by myself and I used to walk past a house where there was a turkey and I had a red coat and the turkey was always gobbling at me. And that's where I started first grade and I really liked school so much, so then when the holidays came, I kept asking my mom if there was any school during the holidays because I didn't like it. And then we moved when I was seven, in the same Obětí nacismu street, to the other end and I started going to another school, and that was the American School. So normal childhood, I used to go to exercise, although I didn't look like it then. It was kind of silly because just as I was getting adapted to that class from the first one, when you move into an already established class, it's a bit of a problem. But then the class broke up again when we were in fifth grade because they built a new school at Spáleniště in Cheb, and we were divided up again. So, we were kind of an unstable class."
Jaroslava Poláková, a paediatrician, was born on 10 July 1949 in Cheb. Her family lived in the house of the displaced Germans. After secondary general education school she entered medicine. When she was 24 years old, she moved to Aš. She worked as a paediatrician all her life. For many years, specifically since 1986, she went on trips with a group of Campers, which fell under the pioneer organization, and organized various events for children with them. She was a long-time member of the group, which ended in 2013. She has two children, a daughter and a son, and in 2023 she was living in Aš, retired and taking care of her grandchildren.
Amálie Pokorná, Kateřina Blažková, Anna Koubová, Ema Kulhánková, Natálie Blažková, Valerie Biedermannová, Sarah Soprová a Alžběta Wernerová ze ZUŠ Roberta Schumanna Aš pod pedagogickým vedením Anny Pokorné
