"Well, when Daddy came back, he was very fond of Prague and knew a lot about the sights, and Mommy always said, 'Children, go for a walk with Daddy and he will tell you stories,' and we said, 'Mommy, we're not going with Daddy, he's so old now, and he's always telling us about Milada Horáková's disbelieving eyes.'"
"One thing Mommy found out was that when she opened the box, she could use a needle to tell Daddy what was new. For instance, when they were after Cardinal Beran, who was the famous Body of God, Mommy described to Daddy how the cathedral was occupied by the cops, and how they could be identified by the pin in their lapel. And that when Mr. Cardinal Beran, still the director of the seminary, started to speak, they ran out and, 'Crucify him, stone him!' and started to disturb it. But from Strahov, the Premonstratensians, the priests from the monastery, they- as soon as they started this circus, the screaming, it was terrible. I remember we were there as bridesmaids, so as Mr Cardinal said, 'Protect these children here so that nothing happens to them', they lined us up so that we would be together. And then when the Corpus Christi started, it was in June, as they were walking and the flowers were being thrown from the basket... the bridesmaids... it was done so that when they were raging there like that, they, the Premonstratensians, they started singing the hymn, they started singing St. Wenceslas."
"A moving truck came to our house. Gentlemen came upstairs to our apartment - we lived on the second floor - and said we had to move out, that we were unwanted in Prague. But my mother was so courageous, so impeccable, that she said, 'Not even Hitler would dare do that. There's the door, get out immediately.' But just imagine that the time was such that they had made fake keys and they waited for a situation where, for example, the youngest sister was home alone. They came in, they opened the door, and now they were snooping on her, and they wanted to know, they wanted to get to the bottom of something, if there was really any anti-state activity going on here. Well, you can't even imagine what it was. When you never knew who was going to be in that apartment."
Marie Fišerová was born on 7 February 1938 in Polná. At the age of four, she moved with her parents to Dejvice, Prague. In 1949, she was a bridesmaid at the Corpus Christi celebration in St. Vitus Cathedral, where Cardinal Josef Beran preached for the last time in public. In the 1950s, Marie’s father, Bohuslav Fišer, a teacher, musicologist and writer, was arrested for anti-state activities. In reality, it was about undesirable relations with Cardinal Beran and pedagogical influence on students. In Pankrác Prison, he carried a box of belongings and a Bible to Milada Horáková’s death cell. In return, she gave him a toy for the children. After her father’s arrest, Marie, her mother and her siblings were forcibly evicted to the outskirts of Prague to unsuitable premises in the yard of the Anděl bakery. In 1960, Marie graduated from the State Conservatory of Music in Prague with a degree in piano and organ. Between 1960-1964, she studied acting at the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. Already during her studies, she became a member of the theatre group Černý tyjátr, with which she travelled the world despite threats from State Security. Since 1980, she has been teaching rhetoric at the Evangelical Theological Faculty of Charles University in Prague. At the time of the interview (2017), she had already been running the Regional Jewish Museum in the Polen Synagogue for seventeen years and worked there as a tour guide.
