Tag #136485 - Interview #77987 (ladislav porjes)

During the era of ‘normalization’ I changed jobs one after the other. First I worked as a guide for Cedok, but I didn’t last long there, and they fired me. [Cedok was the largest Czechoslovak travel agency, founded in 1920 and headquartered in Prague.] Then I worked for Prague Information Services, which was in its time a kind of sanctuary for people who had been fired from everywhere else – they hired us out to companies and concerns that needed capable translators. However, when the management changed, some Gottwald political cadre arrived, who fired everyone indiscriminately.

I also worked as a game machine coin collector for the Slavia soccer club. The machines, on which some sort of games were played, were in every other pub. I made the rounds of the pubs and collected the five crown coins that people had stuffed them with. I drove around with heavy bags of five crown coins, and deposited the money at the bank into the account of the Slavia Prague club. Then I started a job as a warehouse laborer in the Office Machine Mechanics’ Association, and I secretly made money on the side translating. In the Office Machine Mechanics’ Association my boss in the warehouse was Tonda Petrina, also a persecuted journalist, with whom I had once upon a time worked in Rude Pravo. Working as a warehouseman I more or less peacefully, what with two small children and a wife also persecuted due to my political problems, made it to a very modest disability pension. I went on disability after being treated for over a year and a half for cancer of the lymph nodes, when I was quite badly off and I wanted to die. Miraculously, in the end I defeated the illness. I also struggled with heart problems and eye problems, glaucoma.