Ing. Karel Böhm

"For example, I used to build radio receivers, I even made a different transmitter, which was a problem because it could be picked up, I even listened to planes flying over, because there was always a corridor over Kladno. And so I listened to them talking, and that was kind of my hobby. And that hobby eventually resulted in the fact that when I was younger than you, in those sort of years of that eighth, seventh, ninth grade, I started a radio repair business, which was a great advantage, because people were used to waiting a month, two months to get their radios fixed from the official reapir shops, and I got it done in a Saturday, Sunday. And so I was actually making quite a bit of money, and I could buy stuff again."

"I did not experience the war in Prague, although I was really a child, because my father was stationed in Kladno. And we lived in a little house at my grandmother's house on the outskirts of Kladno, and I don't actually remember anything about the war. I just know that it was an ordeal, because whoever was totally deployed there had problems and was always being watched, because it was actually under the Germans. And the raids on Kladno were, I know that we always ran into this kind of a tunnel, well, and there my parents rather protected us with their bodies, it was no fun. And then what was the problem was earning our living. Because Kladno was not an agricultural area, that is, food was much more expensive there than everywhere else and hard to get. Again, there was coal, so we could heat, we had heat."

"Actually, the way we designed it, there was no one to implement it properly, there was not even a proper company to do it, and several construction companies in Czechoslovakia would have had to withdraw to do it, but they did not know how to cooperate. That's interesting, but they couldn't do that. So, again, somebody invented on the board of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, we've always been cunning, I would say, basically crafty. So it was found out what debts the Poles had to the Soviet Union and what debts the Soviet Union had to us, because even that was calculated, very few people know that, even in socialism. And the Czechoslovak leaders found out that the whole glassworks would be built more or less for free by the Poles with the money of the Soviet Union, to whom they owed it."