“We gradually began going to school again, because we had not even been going to school for some time before. That was because some people from Germany whose houses had been bombed out came to the town, and they were usually accommodated in school buildings. They were called ‘national guests.’ Instead, we were going to the Marionette Theatre to get our school assignments (there is a nice Marionette Theatre in Louny). Only then in 1945 we began going to school from September.”
“There were many schools in [Duchcov], because it was an area which had been inhabited by Germans before and the Czech culture was only gaining ground there. Therefore there were both types of schools – German as well as Czech schools; there were many school buildings.”
“I remember the call for help from the radio during the Prague Uprising. They kept playing the tune from Smetana’s Vyšehrad. The war then really ended and we were liberated by the Red Army. People were riding around in horse-driven wagons and rejoicing; I remember that we danced at the town square in Louny.”
Dagmar Knorrová (née Marková) was born in 1937 in Uzhhorod in Carpathian Ruthenia where her parents had moved in search of work. After the Hungarian invasion to the area in 1939 the family was forced to leave their home and return to Bohemia where they lived until the end of the war. Dagmar’s father found a job in an office in Louny in northern Bohemia, but he had to leave the position after the communist coup d’état because he became politically inconvenient to the new regime. The family had to move again, this time to Duchcov near the state border, where Dagmar’s father was transferred. Dagmar studied to be a math and geometry teacher, and later she graduated from construction and transportation at the Czech Technical University. After her graduation she was teaching these subjects at secondary schools.
