Josef Sedloň

"... it was the year 1948, when the communists came, it was sometime in February. They were immediately thrown out of Tábor, everything was taken away, locked up, they weren't allowed to go to the office, to go anywhere, they couldn't take any money, so they were more or less thrown out, and because my parents lived in a house right in the factory, my parents were there waiting to see what would happen..."

"The beginning was in Tábor, in Vančurova Street, where my father lived with his father, and so my grandfather had a cooper's workshop in the basement, where my father trained as a cooper. Then my father went to Heřmanice, where he set up a little private workshop, because he couldn't be in Tábor due to the noise in the basement workshop where the barrels were made, so they had to move out of Tábor. So they moved out of Tábor, they bought some land, there was some wooden building on it, and he moved there with his wife, and they started to build the business there and make barrels, that was 1939. Then a worker dropped a cigarette butt there and the wooden building burned to the ground. It was a problem, it had not been insured enough, because of course there was very little money, and it was only by luck that the mayor of Tabor, Soumar, helped them, because he wanted to... it was a factory that employed people, and now they had no work, so he helped them by getting bricks and stones to build a new building. That's how the first brick buildings were made..."