Jaroslav Švácha

"The big Crystalex broke up into local ones, and it went on. With the fact that the Crystalex here in Bor was under the pretty firm tutelage of the director Arnošt - that it had to work because it's a day-to-day production where you can't stop it for 24 hours. At that time, glass was selling well. The question was how undervalued [czech] crown was in terms of raw materials. You could make a pretty good profit on it, and it worked. Under privatization, there was an interest in it from the likes of these modern captains of industry who had contacts and started seeing it all through the lens of money, and I don't think they saw much of the future of glass. This includes what happened with Crystalex, with Skloexport, and the break-ups of the business networks. The 1990s were an interesting time to start, but on the other hand, the owners got the glassworks, and not everybody thought well of glass." - "Was that the case with Crystalex?" - "It was very very complicated there because of the privatization that was being pushed back and pushed back... finding the least amount of money possible for the golden egg and the golden goose. Everything was stretched out, and I think there was also a political struggle as to who would get the majority and who would benefit financially. Unfortunately, it then ended in that shameful crash in 2008 when it all came to a halt. Suddenly, Nový Bor became a dead city. Who remembers, the lights went out everywhere, and there wasn't a family left unaffected. That was cruel. I guessed - wrongly, thank God - that it wouldn't get up and running again. Once a colossus like that stops, it is such a big hit that the doors get shut, and that will be the end of it. Thank goodness it's different today."

"Mr Ullmann and glass is a chapter in itself. Hubertus Ullmann came from a distinguished glassmaking family, his father having worked as a glassmaker for the Riedl family, a renowned German family that owned many glassworks in the Jablonec region and also, among others, Svor. Mr. Ullmann was removed from Svor after the war. He met us just after 1990, and by some chance and by some twist of fate, the Czech-German or German-Czech historical glass relations were established again when the whole history of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries is interwoven with Czech-German relations as far as glassmaking is concerned. In 1990, he started to help us a lot with making contacts abroad. He took us as representatives of the Klára Glassworks, which produces coloured flat glass, to his stand at the Glasstech fair in 1990, which he did not have to do. He showed us a lot of friends there and showed them the flat glass that we produced in Polevsko, showed it to the world and helped us to trade with it. That was the first introduction to it. He was pointing us in certain directions, saying, 'Watch out, good here, bad here.' It was gentle. I was terribly young at the time, so it was an open world, eyes on top of my head, being introduced to everything. Plus, he was a polyglot, so he remembered Czech even after the years he spent with his family in Argentina after the war because they founded an Argentine glass factory, then in Mexico, then in Germany."