Agi Sofferova with her children, husband and father-in-law

At the far right is my daughter Ruzenka (Ruzena Svobodova, nee Sofferova), I'm beside her, then my husband, our daughter Verka (Vera Sestakova, nee Sofferova), and sitting at the far right is Grandpa Hynek, my husband's father. The picture was taken at our old house in Znojmo in the 1950s. Right after the war we wanted to immigrate to Israel; we thought about it, but I became pregnant with Vera. Plus it was difficult. My husband didn't have any sort of trade. And he wasn't much good at languages either. So then we were afraid to go. So we stayed in Znojmo and lived in a house in the old town, close to the city hall. All the houses there have cellars, about three levels deep. Apparently they were all even somehow interconnected. We lived close to the entrances to the underground. But unfortunately the cellars were full of ground water. Then they repaired them, they made these 60 cm thick walls. During our time off we used to go with the children to Vranov, which is about 20 kilometers from here. There, when they started giving out loans, we built a cottage, this log cabin. There we spent holidays with the kids. It was a beautiful cabin. In the beginning, when we didn't have a car, we used to take the train there, and walked. With knapsacks. It used to be nice there, sociable, with the neighbors and so on. We knew a lot of people around there. One of them started building a cottage, my husband saw it, and had to have one too. So during the summer we lived there. It was fun there, we made campfires, you could swim there, go picking mushrooms and raspberries in the woods. Our children grew up at that cottage. Ruzena graduated from medical high school here in Znojmo and worked as a nurse for a general practitioner. In 1990 she went to Austria to work, to Sankt Pölten, which is about 90 kilometers from Znojmo. She didn't live there, she just commuted. She had an apartment in a dormitory for nurses, which she used when she had shifts or when she didn't go home. She used to work 12 hour shifts, and when she had two or three shifts, she then had three days off. Vera graduated from high school, and then did a second high school degree, so that she could work as a nursery school teacher. That she studied for about four years, distance learning. She then worked in Znojmo as the principal of a nursery school.