Blanka Janoušková

"And then I got to the eighth grade. We had a class teacher, she was a hardened communist. And one day she came into the classroom in the morning and she said, 'Well, whoever wants to continue studying in high school, stand up.' So I stood up too and she said, 'Whey, you sit down.' For me it was just... from then on I knew that I really hated the communists because I was the valedictorian of the class, all A's, I wanted to study and they just... they don't go through that train. So I stayed till ninth grade, it was still such a novelty that you could stay in ninth grade, and then they offered me that the only thing that would make me turn a blind eye was that I could go and learn to be a hairdresser. There was quite a bit of interest in that, because they were making a lot of money on the hairdressers. I was terribly desperate because I was a good drawer and I wanted to study some kind of art. The year before, I'd applied for graphic design, but of course that didn't work out. And from the ninth grade onwards, all the other teachers interceded for me, my dad's boss came, he interceded too. So in the end I managed to get into the secondary school of arts and crafts, so I was in seventh heaven."

"My father was an aeronautical engineer, he worked at the airport. And in 1939, when the Germans came, they occupied all the airports and other strategic places and threw all the Czechs out of the airport. My dad had quite an illustrious sporting career before that, he raced double canoes, even won a gold medal in 1936 in Berlin with his friend Jan Brzak. And when he finished his racing career, that was in 1936, he still went to Sweden for two years to train. And when he came back, the Germans came and he was unemployed. He didn't know what to do, so he started building racing canoes for his friends. Because he was a machinist, he knew how to do it, he knew how to design it. He was quite successful, then somebody said why don't he get a trade certificate, so he got a trade certificate. And during the Protectorate he built up quite a decent company for making skis and boats."