Josef Vávra

"In Prachatice, my boy went for an examination with bronchi and he caught salmonella there. We went there, we didn't know anything, my wife went there to visit him every other day or every day. He was there for a week, still a small child, two years old. He was looking forward to going home. Then they suddenly called us on Monday that he got salmonella, if we have a car, that we have to take him to Budějovice to the infectious dept. So, she called me to my work, for so long, instead of taking him by an ambulance there. I came home from work, I took my car, and I arrived here at three or half past three in the afternoon. And here they said, 'Well, man, the boy is drained of water, who gave it to you like that? Why didn´t they bring him here by themselves?' Well, I had the papers. He was already drained and he died there before the morning, here in Budějovice, the little boy, the two-year-old boy." - "What was his name?" - "Pepíček, Pepíček Vávra. So, my wife and I somehow survived that. And in half a year, now Věruška got to the hospital, a suspicion of an appendix, it was a working Saturday. They left her there, they wouldn't let her go home, that she might have an infected appendix, they gave her ice on it. My wife took her pajamas there. In the evening, around six o'clock, she stayed with her for an hour, then she had to go home, the nurses told her to. They hadn't let us stay there in the hospital back then yet. And imagine it was Saturday. And on Sunday morning they called us from Prachatice from the hospital, that they had to take the girl to the hospital in Budějovice at night, that she felt sick and began to urinate blood. Well, they transferred her and called us from Budějovice in two hours, at eleven, that the girl was dead."

“When I was still very little, we went to visit my grandmother at Pankrác, and already in the train people helped us with various things, and they even accompanied us to Pankrác. I went with my aunt, she was twelve or thirteen, she was my mother’s sister. We got up in the morning and walked about two hours to the train station in Husinec. Back then it wasn’t like it is nowadays, that you’ve got transport everywhere. Back then you walked everywhere, it was winter, and the snow was deep. I don’t remember much of the prison, only some hazy images of meeting with Grandma. That was my first memory in connection with prisons. My aunt was still little then, a child taking a child. That’s how it was back then, you forget that over time, actually. It’s getting better now, in my old age.”

"Does it matter to you today that you've had the life that complicated?" - " It happens to me sometimes when a person is at the bottom, so he wonders why did it have to be that way? It goes into a person's head unnecessarily, so it somehow cloudes the mind and it's not right. It is better if one has the head clear, with better experiences. It shows now when a person is older, I didn't have it before. As long as one lives a normal life, family life, and one is younger, there is some fun. You don't have the fun like that today; it is just talks from time to time. These thoughts come to an old man. It's not until certain years, you have a clear head. As a person begins to age, then it starts. I don't know how it will go on to keep it at least like this. Now the grandchildren will make me a little happy, so I can have happier thoughts. If I just think about this, I will go crazy from what they say. But that's not possible, if a person wants to live a while further, then the head has to be cleared a bit somewhere. It depends on the human psyche."