Marie Zajíčková

* 1937

  • “I first felt it at school, certain tutors started to kind of, I don't want to say, maybe terrorize me. But they dwelt on my single words when I described something. I remember exactly that I was describing an experiment in chemistry and I said: Let us put it in a small glass. The cantor corrected me rudely and told me that I was supposed to say into a glass, not a small one. It was just to confuse me somehow. It was unpleasant.”

  • “They set up a faux-paux for dad. Had he not moved out, they were prepared to set up finding a gun with him, which was not his, but it would be attributed to him. The lady who worked at our place watched the driver who arrived when he was at our place when they were searching our place. She went to see where he was going. He went to the hayloft and wanted to put the gun there, so that it would be so called found there. They had it set up in such a way that if my parents did not want to leave, they would say that we were keeping the gun, so the trap worked and dad would then go to jail.”

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Pohoří, 15.11.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 54:10
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

They confiscated our farm. Dad was lucky as hell that he did not have to go to jail

Marie Zajíčková in mid 1950s
Marie Zajíčková in mid 1950s
zdroj: Archiv pamětnice

Marie Zajíčková, née Rathouská, was born on April 4, 1937. She lived with her parents and two older siblings in the village of Semechnice in the Rychnov region. Parents made a living as landowners, raising horses and cows. The peaceful family village life changed with the advent of the communist regime. Her parents had to pay unmanageable benefits, at that time the witness applied to a high school of economics, where she was not accepted because of her kulak origin. She entered the school in Nové Město nad Metují, where she learned the trade of watchmaking. The harassment from the communist regime did not stop; the parents soon had to move out of the farm in Semechnice. They found refuge in a poor cottage in Olešnice in the Orlické mountains, where, however, they initially struggled with poverty. Later, the witness passed her matriculation exam and got a placement at the company Elektročas in Prague. During normalization, she replaced a number of other professions. She stayed in the big city until her retirement, when she moved back to the foothills of the Eagle Mountains. In 2023, she lived in the village of Pohoří near Dobruška.