Ilona Zimová

"Mum was director´s daughter, so she couldn't do anything. She couldn't go to work, if she started somewhere, they made sure she quit in a while. So she couldn't get a job. For a time, she was a part-time worker in a cooperative farm. That was about the only job, because the director's daughter could only go and clean cows' asses. That was the only job, the gentlemen said it much more rudely, to make it rhyme, right. But there was simply no other work for her, so out of desperation my mother rented a farm in Červený Kostelec, eight hectares of fields, and she worked on that."

"You know what, maybe my first memories are those of currency [reform] and that was in '53. As children we used to count crowns and help, there used to be change scattered on the table and we rolled it up into rolls, that's what I remember. And my grandpa came from the ministry saying that there would be currency [reform], we should spend it all. He advised everybody, and he didn't spend anything himself, and he lost everything. And then I asked him if he minded, and he said no. He just sort of went over it, it´s hard to understand. He gave advice to everybody, so everybody who had money spent it. We even had, there was a safe downstairs from my grandpa's butcher shop, and it was full of matches, because there was nothing else in the shop."