"The rectory was still functioning when I lived there. The whole village was still there - the parish office, the school, everything worked. Then the dam started to be built, so they started to loot it, they took everything away, they loaded the cars, they tore down half the wall by the cemetery, there were such beautiful, leaky bricks. The bigwigs stole it." - "How do you feel now that you're back in Skoky?" - "Terribly. We go there every year, we must. My grandfather from Germany is buried there, they've made a new morgue, it's something beautiful, and they're always doing things."
"We used to go on pilgrimage on Palm Sunday. The bridesmaids would carry the Virgin Mary of Skoky on stilts for about twenty kilometres to the church, and they would walk in procession. It was beautiful, I can't say that enough." - "Didn't the Communists mind that there was such a spiritual life there?" - "Probably not... they took everything when they started building the dam. There was a parish priest living in Skoky, he came from somewhere in Moravia and I think his name was Vilém Cetl. The communists arrested him a couple of times. We lived in the first house on the farm and even then we had a telephone - it was such a telephone that we could call the parish. Every time we saw a strange car coming, because children notice everything, we would call the parish priest. He went and hid. Only once he got arrested and not any more. We were such a liaison. He was a young parish priest, he died soon in Nejdek, he got tuberculosis, he was not even fifty."
Cecílie Hlaváčková, née Kramarová, was born on 16 May 1941 in the French village of Saint-Léger-le Petit. Her family came here from Slovakia in the interwar period to work. They lived through the Second World War and then returned to Czechoslovakia. As part of the resettlement of the border area, they came to Skoky near Žlutice, where they farmed the farms and fields of the displaced Germans. Their life also revolved a lot around their faith. The family later helped the local parish priest who was persecuted by the regime. Due to the collectivization in agriculture and the later construction of the Žlutice dam, most people left Skoky, including the relatives of the witness. However, she lived there until 1961 and after she left, her aunt Marie Holešová remained the last resident of Skoky. The witness and her husband joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and then left the party. In 2024, she was living in Třebouň.
