After the war we returned to live in our apartment in Prague, since it was still ours, and my mother reopened Modni Salon Linie right away. Her sister teta Pisty came to work there too, managing about 10 seamstresses, while my mother did the women’s dress designs and patterns herself. We also had an au pair, I think her name was Ela, who helped my mother with me and my sister.

My father got an important position in the government, with the official title vrchní rada Ministerstva financí, though people around him would shorten it to vrchní rada, or vrchní finanční rada, or vrchní rada financí, and he was head of Department II, the presidial department, of the Osídlovací úřad and Fond národní obnovy in Prague, the office that handled the settling of confiscated German and collaborator property, starting in January 1946.

We lived very well because of it. My father had a big four-door Ford, and as part of his job he had two drivers assigned to him, one named Mr. Foukal and one named Mr. Kuta, and I never forgot their names since they were so nice to us kids. They came every morning to pick up my father. My sister went to elementary school at Náměstí Míru, a Catholic school taught by nuns, and the driver would drop her off first, before picking up my father, and then they would bring my father home for lunch and wait outside for him. Sometimes, while they waited, they would give me a ride on their lap, driving slowly around the block, and I remember many trips they drove us on, over weekends and on vacations.

We went every Sunday to church, to svatá Ludmila, since going to church together was just part of our weekly routine as a family.

We had to speak to our parents in very formal Czech, only vykání, never tykání, using old formal expressions — no hi or hello was allowed, only rukulíbám, “I kiss your hand.”

We went often to Bohdalov, since our family had a room set aside just for us at my father’s relatives’ mill there. I remember my father taking us duck hunting, and on the way back to the mill our dog got bitten in the lip by a poisonous snake. Another time he took me and my sister to the cabin in the forest, and near it he sat us down close to a clearing and told us to be very quiet, and then he walked a little distance away and used a special whistle to lure deer right up to us, since he was a very good hunter and knew how to call deer and elk with mating calls. That day is very memorable to me, because while I was sitting on a little hill, I was getting bitten by ants the whole time, since the hill turned out to be an anthill, and I did not dare say a word or move, because I was too afraid of disobeying my father’s instructions.

One time, at a formal lunch at the kitchen dining table, while the driver was waiting outside for my father, everyone finished eating before me, since I was always last, and my father said, “Again last!” I was around 5 years old, and I answered, “Someone has to be last.” My father got up and slapped me across the face, and he said that he was not my friend, he was my father, and when he spoke it was as if God spoke. That was one of only three times my father was ever physical with me. Normally he would just talk to me, to explain why I could not say or do something wrong, and that was a lot more taxing on me, since I would rather have had him slap me and be done with it.

Our au pair also took my sister and me to a nearby pond once to teach us how to swim, and we had a cork flotation device for our chests. My sister was doing very well, but I was afraid to put my face under water and breathe out, so the au pair decided to teach me by holding my face under the water herself, and I felt like I would drown, and it scared me so much that I did not learn how to swim until I was 15 years old.

At the mill, in the backyard, my father and I went to pee near some bushes at the edge of the property, and it was very painful for me to pee, since the skin on top was swollen and looked like a raspberry. My father noticed it right away and drove me straight to a doctor, who cut the skin off, like a partial circumcision, and it was very painful.

I was very skinny, and everyone was concerned about it, trying to fatten me up. My father would take me to doctors to figure out why I was not eating enough, and they would make me drink some awful white liquid and put me in front of an X-ray machine to look at my insides. It would take forever, and the result was always that my stomach was small and I was swallowing air, leaving less space for food. I resented being constantly pushed to eat more than I wanted, to a point that I wished I would be in a concentration camp, since I envied the kids who were being starved there instead.

We were visiting often hrabě Podstatzky’s mansion, or maybe it was a castle, in Velké Meziříčí, and my father had a specific bedroom reserved for us there too. The gate to the mansion was very memorable to me, since there were two iron hooks in the middle of it, meant to stop a car from driving through. For a car to pass, the hinged hooks had to be lowered to the ground. One time on our way there, our car drove over a rabbit. We stopped, and the dead rabbit was put on the floor of the car, though I am not sure if it was used for food later. I also remember a fox hunt my father, Podstatzky, and others had, and afterward, in the evening, they had a big bonfire on some meadow. Everyone was drinking, and my father and hrabě Podstatzky would jump over the fire, and people would have to extinguish sparks that caught on their coats. One time my mother forgot to pack some formal dress of my father’s, so my mother had to iron his pumpky, his hunting pants, to make them look like regular pants for dinner, and my father was livid at my mother about it. I remember the driver Foukal was angry at my father for treating her that way. In 2005, my family and I visited the mansion and met hrabě Podstatzky’s daughter, Maria, who remembered that dinner vividly, my father wearing the ironed pumpky, and she said that she and her brothers got a big kick out of it and could not stop laughing. She showed my children the historical places and invited us for a great lunch of plum dumplings and poppy seed dumplings, where we also met her two brothers. I am glad my children got to meet them, since Maria and one of her brothers have died since then, and I am not sure if the youngest one is still living.

We also went many times to Šámalova Louka in the Jizerské Mountains, since it was owned by the government, and my father would have exclusive use of it at times. He would go there hunting, mainly elk, with some friends, and I remember going there in summers and also in winters when there was snow. Toward the end, he bought us a pony, and I remember him and two caretakers taming the pony in the courtyard, trying to put a saddle on him, and at the end they succeeded. The two caretakers lived at the compound and were characters — bearded, smoking long curved pipes. They liked kids, and my sister and I would sometimes visit them in their room, and they would take us on a horse-drawn hay wagon. I have fond memories of the fun we had with them.

We also went many times to Mariánské Lázně, since my father had some business there, and my uncle, strýc Lona, husband of my mother’s sister Manci, had a doctor’s office there too; Kudibal lived one block away from them.

We basically lived very well, and life was great. Then one time, when we were at Šámalova Louka, we had to suddenly cut it short and leave. I remember my father being very angry that he was ordered to leave because some high-level Communist official, Rudolf Slánský, wanted to use the Šámalova Louka compound. That was the start of everything going down.