New Transcripts at the NCSML

Voucher for buying goods at Tuzex stores in Czechoslovakia

More oral histories have been transcribed as part of Recording Voices & Documenting Memories. Full transcripts are available to researchers upon request at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library.

In this excerpt from an interview with Dasa Kozakova, she remembers shopping - and the shortage of goods - in Czechoslovakia during the 1970s and 1980s:

"There wasn’t toilet paper. So my father-in-law was forever sitting and cutting newspapers into little squares. Really! There just wasn’t paper... And, for example, onions - all of a sudden for four months there weren’t any onions. And it is difficult to cook Czech food without onions. Czech food has lots of sauces and their base is an onion.
 
"I would always pull up at a store with the kids in a pram and ask what was on sale. Then we would stand in the queue and buy as much of it as we could, because we gave it then to my parents and my mother-in-law too, so that everybody had. And that was it, quite simply - the constant struggle for ordinary things. Then, when I went to work (I worked at Albertov),  there was a little store, and I had to go there at noon to buy bread. Because if I went when I finished work at 3:30, there wasn’t any more. So, there were all of these nonsensical things. In the end, everyone had bread, but with such difficulty! 

"When the boys had just started at primary school, my son sat beside a greengrocer’s son. And the greengrocer’s son was always bringing in oranges or apples – these sorts of things – and my son never had them, because I wasn’t capable of finding them. I went into the grocery store and there were potatoes, maybe carrots. There just weren’t these sorts of things. And so I, even though I didn’t like it, after about half a year of my son saying ‘I want an orange too!’ I said ‘You can’t have one! Oranges are for Christmas!’ – because all of a sudden there were oranges then. Everyone could buy two kilos. They were Cuban, they were ugly – they were good, but they were ugly. They didn’t look good, but they were juicy. So I went to the greengrocer, the kid’s father, and asked him either to stop giving his son this fruit, or to give it to mine too!"

..."Meat was also impossible to find. There was always beef brisket. And if you were lucky there was shank or ribs. But we never saw sirloin. We never saw that sort of meat. You just couldn’t get it, not even in restaurants. I don’t know. You couldn’t find rump steak. Ham? I don’t know where that disappeared. Because again, all you could get was pork belly, you know. So belly and pork brisket you could get. And always on Monday the butcher’s was closed. And so for meat on Tuesday there were queues from first thing. My mother-in-law, she still came from that old school and she still cooked and so she always stood in these queues so as to buy fake tenderloin or something of the sort. So meat was also a big problem. Finding bacon? And ham? Not possible! For a normal person, that is, who didn’t have any connections…"

How were the stores back then? 

"Everybody went about with a string bag. This was a type of bag which looks quite modern – maybe not now but a couple of years ago this bag reappeared. So everyone had a string bag, and when someone by chance saw something available, they bought it!"