Marta Kellerová

“It was like an oasis, because in Jimramov, in 1971, religion was still being taught at four schools. They didn’t dare to cancel it there. They could not do anything about it, and the school principals were just telling my husband: ´Pastor, please, tell those parents that they do not sign up their children for religion classes. You know, we have problems when there are many children who want classes of religion.´ My husband would always reply: ´Well, I am not going to tell them this. Tell them yourselves.´”

“Jiří Vaněk was the director of the Puppet Film Studio and it was before 1968 and thus they also had some little business from abroad. One day some Dutchmen came and they wanted us to make a panorama for their film. I remember that there were some puppets with round heads in it. They offered the job to me. I thought, why not: my husband-to-be was doing his military service and I had time. And so I was working overtime, staying in the studio and creating this panorama. I was sitting there and thinking how to create the puppets’ hair according to the drawing. Trnka passed by, he knew that I was working there, and he stopped by me and advised me. At that time, the hair-makers used artificial thread for this. Trnka advised me: ´Use a holder from a pencil with an exchangeable lead and pass the thread through it like this and attach it to the T-shirt and then glue it.´ I was surprised that he even spoke to me, a girl who had just graduated from school. But he did advise me and he even watched what I was doing. He was so nice and friendly.”

“I didn’t expect that the young people would have so much fun here, and I’m not talking about my grandsons, but about the type of teenagers who are bored by everything and who don’t want to do anything and for whom everybody else is stupid in their opinion. And now, you give this guy a chisel and a hammer, and he begins to work on a log and then he embraces the tree like this and says: ´this is so beautiful,´ and he likes the smell of wood and suddenly he is happy that he can create something with his own hands. This kind of miracles just forms part of Běleč.”

“The Russians who were liberating Brno at the end of the war were actually liberated prisoners. Their behaviour was terrible. When these soldiers caused some problem, their commanders were shooting them immediately. People were therefore afraid of them, and moreover, there was shortage of food in Brno at the end of the war. I was about to be born, and my parents therefore fled to Krabčice to my mom’s parents. There was this first Russian army. When there was an air raid, the soldiers found the people hiding in the basement, and my sister was among them, and they were running with them, and then one of the soldiers slammed her against the heating pipe so hard that she suffered a brain concussion. You could see soldiers who had a number of watches on their sleeves like this, or soldiers who shoot a flushing toilet into pieces because they were scared of it. That had to be very hard for the local people, and those who could therefore ran away.”

“The children taught me that things do not have to be perfect. That was also one of the things that my grandma has taught me. One day, when we arrived to Běleč with grandma (she was the unofficial camp manager), it was in autumn, and the campsite was empty and sad and it felt strange. I didn’t bring any toy with me and I was terribly naughty and bored and grandma picked up a log, cut it like this and created a small surface there and drew a face on it and wrapped it in a scarf for me and made me a doll. And that was so wonderful, she completely shocked me by that. Later, after the revolution, when our grandchildren were growing up and all I could see were plastic Barbie dolls, I thought, can there be anything to inspire the children? They look at the doll which is already perfect, and what next? And so I began making wooden puppets and animals and then one of the kids came asking for an elephant. That was a challenge, and so I made an elephant. Thanks to the children I still have things that challenge me.”

“Obviously, the day after they (the Secret Police) came to do a house search, and they even brought my husband with them. It was only then that I realized it. Of course, there were things to hide, we did have samizdat books at home. They carried away a lot of it and they confiscated many of them. But there were some things that they did not find. Ironically, they failed to find German Marks, Francs, and other foreign currencies, which one was normally not supposed to keep at home, and which were stored in my husband’s desk. It was the only thing that we had time to talk about, because at that moment, smoke began coming out from the stove and I stormed into the office and told them to let my husband go, because the stove was broken and there was nobody else to repair it. And in that moment in the basement, my husband managed to tell me that he had the money in his desk and ordered me to hide them. Our second daughter was already studying in Prague and that time, and she was just at home for the weekend, and so I went to my husband’s study and took the money from his desk and hid them under my jumper and carried them out from the house. If they had found them, it would have given them another reason for prosecution, but they eventually charged him with disrupting the state control over churches and cancelled his authorization for the ministry anyway. My husband therefore began going to work to the saw-mill in Planá and we returned in summer 1984, but not to Jimramov, but to an old devastated house near Jimramov, which we purchased for the young people.”