"That was so, oh, wonderful! And while the nuns were in the order, and we had a long surgery schedule, first of all, they brought us snacks in the morning. Especially in the summer when it was hot. They made ice cream. And waffles. Coffee. That was in the morning. When we were there, we didn't change. Except then we switched gloves. They brought us lunch. They had pigs in the back, in the jungle, where is the hillside there. So they killed them sometimes. They brought us some pork sausages. But then it all stopped. But it was still good."
"And when he died, as terrible as the communists were, he was lying in his coffin and he had all the decorations, including the White Cross, and he had a lot of them. I didn't like that. I always said to him, 'Please, why are you wearing that?' And he said, 'I have to. I can´t do anything about it.´ Well, State Security came and removed everything off the coffin. That's how they behaved."
"My father, when he went to the Alps as a student and made friends, his friend, engineer Uhl, was a Nazi or a German. They skied together in the winter. And then suddenly he appeared, but my father didn't know it, he took over the Strakonice armaments factory as a Nazi. And he was the boss there. And besides that, he was in charge of the western part up to Pilsen, and he was in charge of all these incidents and lists of people who showed themselves against Nazism and decided what to do with them. And suddenly he saw the name of a friend of his from before the war. So I remember he immediately came and greeted my father. They were happy to see each other because they had common interests. Politics never played a role for Dad. He didn't recognize political parties either. So he said, 'Look, you're going to come to my factory and work for me, work in the workshop. I need a lot of people.' So that's how it worked out. Otherwise, I don't know."
Milena Šatavová was born on 17 July 1932 in Prague to Jiří Pivrnec and Anna Pivrncová. Until the end of the Second World War, the family lived in Horažďovice, where her father worked as a judge. Her mother was a housewife. Anna Pivrncova’s older brother was a military pilot Karel Mareš. He fled to England during the Second World War and joined the RAF. He refused to join the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, was demoted from a general to a private, and moved to a farm in Sedlčany region. After the war, Milena Šatavová’s father was summoned by President Beneš to Tábor to try war collaborators. He gave unbiased verdicts and refused to join the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, so he was deposed as a judge. His daughter was not allowed to go to university. She did, however, complete a medical course and was able to fulfil her dream of working in the health sector. For fifteen years she was a head nurse in the operating theatres of the hospital in Tábor. She had one son from her marriage to Jan Šatava. Her lifelong passion was sport. Her two granddaughters and two great-grandchildren made her happy at the time of recording (2022). She died on 20 October 2023.
