Marie Krycnerová

* 1933

  • "I was shocked once when we were driving home from the cottage to Karlovy Vary, and we got pulled over by the Soviet military traffic controllers. This young officer went after my little daughter, two years old, who was lying on top of a transistor radio. See, back then, those radios were the only means for you to know what was going on. Well, luckily the radio was off, but he still wanted to get it, and so I went after him. He took his gun. I spoke Russian just as well as I spoke Czech at that time because I had to take state exams. I taught at a language school, five classes of Russian a week, so you can imagine I could speak. I said, 'Your daddy had freed me, and now you want to kill me?' His senior officer came over and took the gun away from him. Later on, my husband told me he thought I'd get shot for real."

  • Teachers' colleges opened after the war, and I passed the exams and went to study. Then Mr. Ruml's father came in with Mr. Losický, but you don't know him; he died soon after the revolution. They started canvassing for the Youth Union. Some students said they would join. Then they asked who wouldn't join, and I said I wouldn't. I was a girl scout so I couldn't join the Youth Union. I was kicked out college right there, without ever taking my first class."

  • It got worse when the air raids started. When we went to school as usual - we went to the Lupáčova Street primary school below the Olšany Cemetery, on the border between Žižkov and Vinohrady - we experienced an air raid. It was February 1945 and the bombs were really falling. Since our school housed a gas and electricity supply point, it wasn't allowed to have a shelter, and they would let us out a little earlier. We stayed on the Holy Cross hillock between Žižkov and Vinohrady and we saw the bombs falling. That was a shock.

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Praha, 19.11.2018

    (audio)
    duration: 47:45
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

When the kids were in trouble or things weren’t going well, I kept dreaming about the bombing

Marie Krycnerová
Marie Krycnerová
photo: PNS student team

Marie Krycnerová was born in Prague on 25 June 1933. As a young child, she witnessed the air raids on Prague in February 1945, which left a lasting mark on her. She wanted to become a teacher from an early age, but she was expelled from the Prague Faculty of Education after she refused to join the Youth Union. She then taught in the Karlovy Vary region while studying at the Faculty of Education in Plzeň. In August 1968, she and her husband were in Yugoslavia and coming back home on 20 August. During the initial days of the invasion she experienced an incident with a Soviet soldier. On 17 November 1989, she accidentally joined a demonstration heading from Vyšehrad to Národní třída, but escaped the police beating. After 1989, she travelled extensively and met Meda Mládková, with whom she lived in America for some time, helping her with household chores.