"I took my children to kindergarten and daycare and went to work. At work, an enterprising communist gave us posters to write. So I wrote the posters at the Vítkovice construction site. And then we went out and I wrote the slogans on the fence of the opposite factory. They were there all the time, until they had to tear down the fence, because they gave me lime, that I should write it with lime. So I wrote it with lime and the Russians drove around. They were so red, they were frozen, they were driving around on the road. And I wrote, 'You're not friends, you're occupiers.' I remember that. And then it stayed there, so they had to tear down the whole fence and make a new one.
"I remember that. I just know that I wasn't allowed to meet them. They were walking in the parade, the children had their dolls and I ran out and I wanted to meet them and I wasn't allowed to and I had to back up and go home and just watch it from the garden as the procession of deported Germans walked through the whole village to the camp down at Luže. There, a makeshift dormitory was built where they stayed until they were taken to the train."
"I have a memory that the Russians came to Frankstadt, but all of us children were already with my grandfather in Šentál, and our mothers were buried in a bunker in the woods so they wouldn't be seen. And the Russians, as they advanced up, wondered where the women were from the children. That's what my parents told me afterwards. But it went normally. They searched something. I don't know if they were looking for food or something else, and then they left. The soldiers went up through Šentál and searched every house, probably looking for food, if they didn't find anything else."
Markéta Kirchnerová, surname Macková, was born on 25 October 1939 in the village of Šentál (German: Schönthal, today Krásné), which was part of the municipality of Hraběšice (German: Rabenseifen). She came from an ethnically mixed marriage of a Czech and a German. Four of her uncles were killed in the Wehrmacht during World War II. Thanks to her father’s Czech roots, the family was not included in the German expulsion, but all relatives on her mother’s side had to join. After elementary school, Markéta Kirchner studied nursing school in Šumperk. At the beginning of her third year, however, she was expelled from school. She put a flag of Tsarist Russia on the notice board, which the school authorities considered an insult to the Soviet Union. The 16-year-old Markéta therefore took up a job at a district construction company and while still at work she graduated from a construction industrial school. She then worked for Vítkovice Construction, where she became the head of operations. It was at work that she met Jaromír Kirchner, whom she married and with whom she had daughters Hana and Magdalena. However, their marriage broke up. Markéta Kirchnerová returned from Vítkovice Construction to the district construction company and then worked at the construction office in Šumperk until her retirement. At the time of filming in 2024, she lived in Šumperk.
