Marie Žlábková

“Mum took the food [by train], one time they actually caught her with a tub of goose fat at the station. And they took her to the Pečkárna for two days, she was locked up there. And if it wasn’t for my uncle, František Ventura, an Olympic champion, who - not that he was a collaborator - but he did have some connections, then she’d have ended up in a concentration camp. Because of some fat!”

“And I had my mother here, she had a laughable pension because mothers didn’t go to work beforehand, when I was little, Dad earned our keep. So she had a pension of some six hundred crowns. And my husband would write various screenplays for people who were employed at the television, and they published it under their own name and gave him half of the money they got for it.”