Miroslava Auerbachova with her children

This is my wife and our children in Maxov. Maxov is this hamlet of four houses a little ways away from Josefov down in the Jizerske Mountains. After the war it emptied, because the original inhabitants, Sudeten Germans, were displaced. My uncle Franta Klemens got it, and then my family and I had it half and half with Aunt Oli's family. We always took turns, we'd be there for one month in the summer, and they for one. My wife was a teacher. I think that she was well liked, at least that's what she claimed, and she also liked her work. She certainly wouldn't have managed to be a housewife, she didn't love housework. That's actually why I learned to cook, it was making a virtue of necessity. On the one hand, being a teacher is nerve-racking, it's not easy working with children, on the other hand, when she got sufficiently used to it and managed to prepare without a major effort, she corrected homework still in school, taught her four hours or so, and was finished. It was also good that she had two months off during the summer, so she could take care of the boys during summer vacation. This schedule suited my wife, though she did sometimes get fed up, she even tried different types of work, but never stayed more than two days. She probably suffered from what's called teacher's syndrome. There was a time when she was treating me like a child. I used to say that I had it good when she still taught at council school, then she was treating me like a 14-year-old, then afterwards like an 8-year-old.