Marie Čálková

* 1927

  • "We went to look out the window and suddenly we see that there is a long freight train, that the doors are opening and that the carriages are full of prisoners in spotted trousers. So he says, `Jesus, they're moving the concentration camps!` And they stopped there. Then they went to the main station, but this was Bubny, Holešovice. We thought they were just going to stand there, but they started to open the doors. The Germans who were guarding them with flintlocks let them jump out of the carriages. It seemed to me at the time that they let them air out, or whatever they were going to do with them. We didn't know. Neither she [a supervisor from work] knew, nor did I know. I wouldn't have dared, but she was so brave, she wasn't afraid to give him [the manager] her opinion or anything. She, when she saw it, she was like, `Come and see if there are any bags in here,' and she started pulling it out of the pantry. That was her action, her idea, I wouldn't have dared to do that then. When she did it, I helped her. We took what we found, some bags, some sacks, to make it worthwhile. Actually, his [the director's] pantry, what we could fit in the bags, we put in there and carried it to the fence. We couldn't go any further, but they could go up to the fence, and they would jump over those rails and run to the fence and we would pass [the food] over those rails. Their guards left them - they had their guards there, they had soldiers with flintlocks guarding them, but they left them so they could take it."

  • "There I was in total commitment and there we did manual work. The company - the head was an engineer Franz Huff, he was a Czech German who grew up in Prague, he knew Czech as German, although he didn't speak Czech to me. The lady who put me there, who spoke Czech, we found out later that she was his mistress during the First Republic. And he invented this company so he wouldn't have to go to the front. It consisted in the fact that as everything was made for the war and for the war factories and the Czech industry didn't exist, didn't exist, so he arranged that for the war factories they supplied such, we called it pertinax. It was a kind of plastic, and the moulding mills in Prague pressed wheels out of it, and somehow they pressed metal axles into the wheels. And we used to take these wheels from the mills in Prague to the Trade Fair Palace. There we were assigned, we called them micrometers. And the metal horseshoes were precisely aimed and we used the micrometer to test the teeth to see if they were all the same size, if there was any broken off."

  • "I woke up in the morning and I saw motorbikes driving along the road, it was already a raid of those Germans with their boats, they had those tin sidecars. One of them was driving the motorbike and one of them was sitting in the boat, they had flintlocks on the motorbike and they were heading towards Budejovice."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Praha 4, 24.11.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 02:48:35
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
  • 2

    Praha, 17.05.2024

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    duration: 01:50:44
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
  • 3

    Praha, 25.07.2024

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    duration: 02:13:25
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
  • 4

    Praha, 31.07.2024

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    duration: 01:07:14
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
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My life seemed ordinary

Marie Čálková, 1940s
Marie Čálková, 1940s
photo: Archive of the witness

Marie Čálková, née Bártová, later Šnoblová, was born on 25 December 1927 in Prague to Marie Bártová. She never knew her biological father. She spent her childhood in Bystřice u Benešova with her grandparents. There she experienced the beginning of the German occupation. In 1939, she moved with her mother, stepfather and half-sister to Vysočany in Prague. From 1941, the family lived in a malting plant in Podbaba, where her father worked. In 1942-1944 she studied at a two-year business school in Žižkov. From 1944 she was totally deployed in Holešovice in a German arms parts company. In the spring of 1945, she and her supervisor gave food to prisoners from the Litoměřice concentration camp at Bubny station. During the Prague Uprising she was imprisoned by the Germans in the cellar of the malt house for about four days. After the liberation she moved with her family to Chabařovice in Ústí nad Labem. In 1950 she married František Čálek and they raised one son. In the following years she worked as a zookeeper or economist, later as the head of the local post office. In 2024 she lived in Prague.