Věra Kafková

* 1937

  • “I worked at the post office for twenty-five years, delivering post. Not sitting behind the counter... And when I was to deliver a letter with an exotic stamp, from Germany, from abroad, that was something, kind of a thrill. That lady over there, her son’s a doctor and he’s in Germany... So I wondered, I reckoned, her only son, she here a widow and her son in Germany. No one was allowed anywhere, in the beginning it was trouble just to receive a letter from abroad, that got you an entry somewhere. So it was kind of pretty exotic.”

  • “We all had to work in those fields! It wasn’t like we would come back from school and do whatever we wanted to. No, you go there, you go pick nettles for the geese, Grandma shooed us along, you go there and there, or join us in the field. So then we all had to work in the field. I was attending economy school at the time, for two years. In the morning, before leaving for the bus, which left at seven o’clock, at one point I’d go and feed the pigs. That’s how we had the work split up.”

  • “Then we also had a sister who had spent a year in Russia. Well, that was a pretty questionable matter, because Dad was a People’s Partyer [Christian Democrat - trans.], and suddenly his daughter goes off to study in Russia for a year! No one wanted to take her to the airport, a friend took her at the time, but then she came back and everything took a turn for the better somehow. But the situation was pretty tense when she first said she was going to study in Russia. But every experience of that kind is useful.”

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Farm work whipped you into shape, made you healthy

Věra Kafková, née Šťastná, was born on 1 March 1937 in Žerčice, into a medium-sized farm with twelve hectares of land. Her parents grudgingly joined the local agricultural cooperative following the 1948 Communist coup; in 1954 they left the co-op, but rejoined it again six years later. Věra studied a two-year economy course and then worked at the railway school in Nymburk. In 1959 she married and moved to Pardubice, where she worked at the train depot. She has two children. When her maternity leave ended she found a job at the post office as a postlady, which she did for twenty-five years.