“For five years, six years we served people, catering and all for free. Because first came the currency [reform] in the year forty-five, and then again in the fifties. So we always started again from scratch, I don’t even want to think of it.”
“He came by car, well, and up there in the attic he found that [the deserter] had appendicitis. And he wanted drive off in his little car - when few people had cars those days. And Dad said: ‘Surely, doctor, you can’t just leave, you won’t leave him here to die, will you? I can’t bury him here! And I can’t take him to hospital, I only have cows!’ And so [the doctor] took him and dropped him off in front of the hospital and drove away.”
“They arrested him in Mum’s kitchen in Malešov. It was a restaurant, but he was in the private part, in the kitchen. Those were prison sentences from five to twenty years. He was shot after some nine years because he overstepped some line somewhere in the yard [of the prison in Leopoldov - ed.], where they were allowed out for walks.”
Anežka Borová, née Koudelová, was born on 9 June 1924 in Kutná Hora as the younger of two sisters. The Koudela family lived in a small settlement near Kutná Hora, which was called Velký Rybník (Big Pond), where her father worked as a dam keeper and also ran a pub with the help of the whole family. During the war the family hid two deserters from the Polish army for several months and helped escape over the borders. Anežka’s parents also divorced during the war, and the witness had to help her father with the pub, thus avoiding forced labour. After the Communist coup of 1948, her father lost his job, and so they moved to Prague. Anežka’s mother, remarried, lived in Malešov, where she got mixed up in the trial with the anti-Communist resistance fighter Josef Vaníček, and she ended up in prison for four years. Her husband Jan Dlouhý, a butcher, spent half a year in prison for buying cattle from farmers so that they wouldn’t have to give them to the local agricultural coop. The Dlouhýs lost their house and were bullied by the regime their whole life. Anežka Borová worked in Prague as a cook and a manager of company canteens and at the Restaurants & Canteens enterprise. The last seventeen years of her work life she was employed at the technical department of the Prague zoo. In 1978 she married the writer Josef Bor (1906-1979), of Jewish origin, whose original name was Josef Bondy. Her husband died a year after they married.
