Helena Kovanicova

This photograph of me was taken in 1946, when my husband Rudolf and I were on vacation in Sumava by Babylon. Babylon was this popular lake, where there was a complex of several hotels. We lived in this little hotel. After the war we didn't have much money, so we actually never went on a honeymoon. We were just once on vacation in the Tatras. We had a plane ticket to Poprad, and from there we went by bus to the Tatra Mountains. After the war I didn't get out abroad, only later, in 1968, when we already had our son Jirka, were my husband and I in Vienna for about a week. My husband was there on a business trip, he was taking the place of an ill colleague at a trade show. He stayed there from about October to March. This is because my husband worked as a buyer and seller. Though he never joined the Communist Party, long before the revolution, sometime in the 1950s, he was abroad on business, once in Germany, then in Holland and Belgium. Back then he worked for the Koospol company. After the year 1968 he was in London at some exhibition of packaging technology, but after that he didn't do that well, of course due to political reasons.