Ivan Karlín

"We got married in '61 and, as a wedding present, the company fired me because I was a foreign trader, that meant travelling abroad, but I was not the right cadre so I didn't get a passport. They fired me unceremoniously without giving grounds and, at the same time, they also fired my wife from Centrotex and they didn't tell her officially but it was sort of implied they fired her because I was her husband."

"As we have all recently recalled, the Germans came on 15 March 1939, which I remember as if it were today. We had movable shutters in our apartment. My mum pulled up the shutters and called my dad: 'Karel, here they come.' The Germans were arriving outside our windows. My mother had lived through the First World War in Brno the city, and since war almost inevitably means a shortage of everything, she and brother had to queue all night for potatoes, for bread, for basic things like that. So she said, 'I want to live in the country,' and my dad bought this plot of land right here where we are now."