I was often ridiculed at school because of my adoption
Stáhnout obrázek
Alena Marková, née Landergottová, was born on 8 April 1947. Her biological mother gave her up for adoption immediately after birth because she did not have the strength to raise her daughter alone in the difficult post-war period. The biological father was deported to Germany with his entire family after the war and did not know about the birth of his daughter. Alena Marková considered her adoptive parents as her own. She attended primary school in Svatava, where she often faced ridicule from her classmates because of her adoption. Later she trained as a shop assistant - a warehouse woman. She then completed her education as a cashier and later worked as an inventory manager, travelling to inspections throughout the district. In August 1968, she and her husband were on vacation with a cousin in Germany. From the radio they heard about the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops. Her husband did not want to return to Czechoslovakia, but Alena Marková could not leave her mother home alone. On their return to Svatava, they saw Soviet soldiers lounging in the fields and meadows, and locals were pasting leaflets about the counter-revolution on their fences every day. In the following years, despite the restrictions on travel during the totalitarian era, Alena Marková used to her family in Germany. Police officers came to her home to check whether she was selling property and planning to emigrate. However, she never intended to do so. In the 1980s, she met Nadezhda Nikishina, a Soviet prisoner of a women‘s concentration camp, who came to Svatava for a commemorative event. She refused offers to join the Communist Party and never joined the party. After the Velvet Revolution she started her own business and opened her own shop, Kovo. At the time of the recording in 2025, Alena Marková lived in Svatava-Podlesí.
