Family House in Kutna Hora

Dad bought a house in Kutna Hora in 1932.

Before that, we had been renting a place from Mrs. Roubickova. Dad bought it from Mrs. Taborska, who was butcher and originally had a store in the house.

As Kutna Hora had been undermined and the ground was falling through, a big cellar was formed in the house when it was being built in 1904 or 1905.

The butcher used this as an ice cellar. My father turned her store into a consulting room. Our house stood on the corner of the streets Ceska and Hradebni. It was a one-story building with a garden. We had running water, electricity and gas.

Our house was relatively large, with about five apartments - two upstairs and two downstairs, along with a consulting room. We had a four-room apartment on the ground floor.

The house had a turret with a bay window, and there was a corner room that was hard to heat as there were seven windows. There was furniture that a carpenter in Kutna Hora had made to commission - a cupboard, glass cabinet, table, chairs, desk, two small armchairs and a collapsible leather couch.

It was a large room and, like the other ones, had parquet flooring. Only the entrance hall and bathroom were tiled. In the apartment was a hallway, dining room, guest room, bedroom and living room where I lived at first with my sister.

When we were a bit bigger they put me and Rita in the guest room. That was only for a while, though, because after our grandparents had moved in, they lived in the guest room and me and my sister were back in the living room, where there was an American stove.

Our grandparent's maid, Fanynka, slept in the kitchen. It was a cold apartment; the kitchen was north-facing and had fashionable terrazzo flooring with really cold stone tiles.

The rooms were over four meters high, which made them difficult to heat. There was a coal stove and a gas-fired two-ring cooker in the kitchen.

Mom always had socks and a sweater on when she was there. The American stove in the living room couldn't heat everything, so we later used a Musgrave stove which heated both the living room and the bedroom.