Tag #139103 - Interview #99513 (Blanka Dvorska)

I'll return to my parents. I know that before I was born, my father was in the tobacco business, and his partners took advantage of him or tricked him in some way. So my father lost even the little that he had. But I'd prefer to talk about what I remember from my own experiences. When I was about three, my father owned a grocery store. This store was on the main street. My mother worked in the store too. On the one hand, she was a housewife that was fully employed by a numerous family, and on top of this she also sold in the store. But I have to say that that store was more like a general store, and not just one with groceries. I remember that at one time we were for example selling folding beds there. My parents latched onto whatever they could. They would've perhaps sold anything there. There my mother sold excellent, home-baked bread, or homemade soap that my father used to make in a cellar by the millstream.

I remember that when I was attending school, it happened more than once that I had to help out in the store. That little store of ours was so pitiful, that it would also happen that a customer would come for a kilo of sugar, for example, and we wouldn't have it. So I'd quickly run out of the store and run across the main street to the grocery wholesaler's. There I'd buy that kilo of sugar and run with it back to our store. There I'd sell the sugar for some five or ten hellers more [In 1929 it was decreed by law that one Czechoslovak crown (Kc) 1 Kc – 100 hellers, was equal in value to 44.58 mg of gold – Editor's note]. So that is truly how we did business.